I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.
We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.
The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.
Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
Every island to a child is a treasure island.
Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.
If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: