Kathy > Kathy's Quotes

“So what are you planning to do with the rest of your life?
Develop a drinking problem. More Scotch, please.”
― Daniel Silva, The Marching Season

“I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.”
― William Trevor

“Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
― Elmore Leonard

“My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.”
― Elmore Leonard, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

“Psychopaths... people who know the differences between right and wrong, but don't give a shit. That's what most of my characters are like.”
― Elmore Leonard

“May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.”
― George Carlin

“Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore.”
― Thea Dorn

“What I don't want is to be called an octogenarian. I saw 'Octogenarian Jane Gardam' and I thought 'Blow me!' I mean, I am, but that's not the point."

(Inteview, The Guardian, 8 January 2011)”
― Jane Gardam

“I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.”
― William Trevor

“It may surprise you to find that the older one gets the more we appreciate the wisdom of those we did not think possessed it. (Bascot)”
― Maureen Ash, The Alehouse Murders

“We were born to be friends. We both knew it. The Australian Aborigines have the traditional belief that a complete human being comprises two parts that are split before birth, that we spend our lives seeking the other part to make ourselves whole again, and that only the lucky succeed in doing so.”
― John Grant, Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

“Referring to a mask as a law of nature is another way of saying that it cannot be escaped or transcended; there is no getting beyond or beneath it. But when Deleuze describes the intention of interpretation, we find it is 'an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped'." The Nietzschean-inspired disavowal of ideology is based on the claim that critique is only an ongoing series of interpretations where masks give way to nothing but more of their own. Deleuze's instruction is to pierce masks so that motivations and strategies can be discovered, whether they belong to subjects or to a particular manifestation of power. The obvious implication is that the appearance of a mask obscures other qualities that are potentially more fundamental than just another mask.”
― John Grant, Dialectics and Contemporary Politics: Critique and Transformation from Hegel through Post-Marxism

“He hated words. Words glossed every real thing with brittle artifice and deceit. Words were always lies, always intended to deceive even when they held the truth. . . .”
― Bill Granger, The British Cross

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”
― Marcel Proust

“... but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.”
― Pauline Gedge, The Eagle and the Raven

“I'm a firm believer in thinking inside the box. The first thing I do when approaching a new project is to give myself rigid guidelines and precise limits. That's how I begin to think. If I were told that I could create anything in any medium, using any amount of space and any amount of time, I'd stand in a field and scream.”
― Ben Schott

“Properly cared for, a Savile Row suit can be handed down the generations—like gout.”
― Ben Schott, Jeeves and the King of Clubs

“I swear it only hit me then, with full conscious force, who the real villains of this piece had been from start to finish…those lying, cancerous dogs of the mainstream media!”
― Paul Christensen

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“What is this?" Logan shrugged. So, that's how she wanted to play it. "This? This is where Mairi was murdered," Logan”
― J.D. Kirk, Thicker than Water

“It couldn’t have been easy to walk through Sauchiehall Street after closing on a Saturday with some mouthy wee bam shouting, “Fuck me, is that no’ her out of Scooby-Doo?” at you at the top of his lungs.”
― J.D. Kirk, A Litter of Bones

“She asked me why I always had something flip to say. I said that I didn't know, but having been blessed with the gift, I felt obliged to use it.”
― Robert Crais

“My monk had to be a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerance for the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with all its enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from the beginning. Only later did readers begin to wonder and ask about his former roving life, and how and why he became a monk. For reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and write a book about his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, the entire sequence of novels proceeds steadily season by season, year by year, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on his vocation, I was glad to use it. So here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an age of relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented by cantankerous schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always been an unquestioning believer. What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and a different challenge.”
― Ellis Peters, A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael

“Whoever has the world’s plenty and sees a brother in need but shuts up his bowels of compassion from him, how can the love of God be within him?’ translated Vermeer, fairly loosely. ‘Indeed, Father.”
― Graham Brack, Death in Delft

“The grace of God is not endangered by the follies or the wickedness of men.”
― Ellis Peters, The Leper of Saint Giles

“Well, damn it, I think that prosy fool Bridlington was right for once in his life! You've gone stark, staring mad!"
"Very true! I've known it for this half hour and more.”
― Georgette Heyer, Arabella

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
― Anglican clergyman

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Cassie once overheard a well-known mystery writer pontificate from his corner bar stool in Missoula, attempting to woo a young female grad student. The author, who looked like a cross between a buffalo and a walrus, said, “In Missoula if you throw a stick you’ll hit a goddam writer. I wish more people would throw sticks.”
― C.J. Box, Treasure State