Writer Quotes

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

I certainly don't know if you could claim that every theft is wrong, but I'll prove to you that every theft is forbidden, by simply locking you up.

History does not always repeat itself.

Have all the hopes of ages come to naught? Is life no more with noble meaning fraught?

Alone! Alone! No beacon, far or near! No chart, no compass, and no anchor stay!

O what is life, if we must hold it thus as wind-blown sparks hold momentary fire?

Let Justice, blind and halt and maimed, chastise the rebel spirit surging in my veins, let the Law deal me penalties and pains And make me hideous in my neighbours' eyes.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place.

The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.

In my house, it is always a scramble from paycheck to paycheck.

I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.

I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure.

Publishing your work is important. Even if you are giving a piece to some smaller publication for free, you will learn something about your writing. The editor will say something, friends will mention it. You will learn.

Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.

We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.

If you are going to make companies, corporations, actually responsible for the safety of other people's lives, then if they fail in their duty, the only thing to prevent them failing in their duty is the fear that they would be put behind bars.

I've never found it made the slightest difference being a woman - though there is a sort of feeling that as you get older you're not so interesting.

I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deci

I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.

I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.