Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't hold grudges.
come back, come back to me
I often don't read reviews.
I'm quite good at not writing.
one could drown in irrelevance.
I don't really believe in evil at all.
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
She lay in the dark and knew everything.
Politics is the enemy of the imagination.
Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.
When anything can happen, everything matters.
Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.
What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.
Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.
Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.
Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.
The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.
Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.
No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.
Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.