Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a very secretive person.
I've never finished anything by Dickens.
Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.
You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.
I want to live in a city where the future is being mapped out.
There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.
I invent words you think you've heard - spray hopper or swag beetle.
I'm not that well-versed in literary theory - I don't know what it is.
I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
...crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.
I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.
Privately, I'm thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.
Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.
For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.
I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.
I like shaped things. I like shape in things, and I do overshape things, it's true.
Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.
Part of me feels that I'm letting people down by not being as interesting as my books.
Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up.
I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.
You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.
I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.
To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.
These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.
I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.
Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.
The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.
There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.
I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.
I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation.
As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.
Inside, Penlee House is without pretension. It is a space that knows its limitations and its strengths - and makes the most of them.
Almost everyone who's been to primary school in Britain has had towels put on their heads to play the shepherds in the nativity play.
Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.
Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.
I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.
The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham.
Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.
I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.
Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.
I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.
There's a convention that books are mirrors of the real world, but our fact-obsessed age also wants fiction to be factually based and trustworthy.
I liked journalism and thought it was important, certainly more important than fiction. I'd probably still be doing it if I hadn't been elbowed out.
I know the money is important, but, actually, the validation of your career that prizes give is what you really want. But the money is fabulous, too.
I have tested my nerve by reaching a little too closely toward a lengthy alligator on the Gulf Coast and a saucer-sized tarantula in a Houston car park.