Novelist Quotes

Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn't me.

I'll not listen to reason... reason always means what someone else has got to say.

A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.

A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.

Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.

People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.

How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly!

The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

I think writers are very anxious.

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.

But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.

At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.