Quote collection
87 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"She could not mourn. She could no longer weep grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening."
"I haven't changed. Something's happened to me, that's all."
"He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward."
"Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more."
"Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite."
"Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart."
"I came up with a parallel Venice called Venus. set in a parallel Venice about 1701."
"Danger and anger are everywhere. Love is the rarity, the gem buried in the core of the mine, the outpost of God."
"If I ever get to 100, I'd want to be filled with wonder and wild, adolescent, wide-eyed interest in newness. So let's keep the flame burning. Let's stop thinking everyone over 29, or 49, has to be reinforced by concrete."
"I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people."
"In the usual way I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of "normal" work. In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does."
"I am interested in most mythology. Celtic or Christian no more than anything else. I will admit to a pleasure and sense of hope in what I see as the basic teachings of Christ, stripped of the nonsense that has sometimes been accumulated about them and the embarrassing misunderstanding."
"If you run away from trouble, it always follows."
"Robespierre, crippled and blind, has yet to be healed to the knowledge that service - his desire - is a deed of savage-speaking gentleness, not soft-spoken savagery."
"It was so useful to lie with the truth."
"Now, writing every day, and being paid for it and encouraged to do it, it was as if, in the midst of the clich?d dark and stormy night, I found the magical inn, its windows golden lit, and Summer was due to start tomorrow. I can only work at one thing well. Deprive me of that, and my "back-up plan," even now, will be the empty, stormy, darkened heath -- where, incidentally, even unpublished, somehow I'll still be writing."
"At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer."
"I was born in North London in 1947. I didn't learn to read until I was almost 8-partly bad schooling, and partly I suspect slight dyslexic problems. My father, driven mad by this, taught me to read. At 9 I began writing."
"I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didnt always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world."
"I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped."