Fred > Fred's Quotes

“I don't trust anyone who doesn't laugh.”
― Maya Angelou

“…first you’ve got to think of something, and when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That’s all.”
― Agatha Christie, Dead Man's Folly

“If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The writer who thinks that his work is marvellous is heading for trouble.”
― Roald Dahl, The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar and Six More

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I never stop to think, 'oh, this is a role model for people...'. It's fiction!”
― Stephenie Meyer

“I sent out fifteen query letters. I got nine rejections, five no-responses, and one person who wanted to see it.”
― Stephenie Meyer

“The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
― Raymond Chandler

“He wished to write, but could not manage / The pain of persevering toil...”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“There's no point in thinking about publication; I'm writing whatever comes into my head.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.”
― Raymond Chandler

“While thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as 'thrillers designed to be read as literature'.”
― Ian Fleming

“God preserve me from novel-writing, thought Mrs Touchet. God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness! In a cold dormitory, two hundred miles away, three heartbroken, motherless girls had hoped to be visited by their father. But William was busy at his desk, dreaming up Jack Sheppard.”
― Zadie Smith, The Fraud

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other”
― Anton Chekhov

“Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings toward him. She told the story, however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”
― T. S. Eliot

“Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“What I learned from Stonewall is that you can make alliances with people without demanding total agreement.”
― Simon Fanshawe

“When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“If there's a problem, let's know what it is, have an honest conversation, and get on with it.”
― Keir Starmer

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“To rush into explanations is always a sign of weakness.”
― Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery

“If you go to university, you must be prepared to have your views challenged, hear contrary opinions and be exposed to uncomfortable truths.”
― Bridget Phillipson

“All that cant about soldiers and parsons is most offensive in my ears. All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class, whether the same be aristocrat or democrat - all howling down of another class, whether clerical or military - all exacting injustice to individuals, whether monarch or mendicant - is really sickening to me; all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party hatreds, all tyrannies disguised as liberties, I reject and wash my hands of. You think you are a philanthropist; you think you are an advocate of liberty; but I will tell you this - Mr. Hall, the parson of Nunnely, is a better friend both of man and freedom than Hiram Yorke, the reformer of Briarfield.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“Obscurity creates an aura of importance. ...It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot grasp what is going on, there must be something significant going on...whereas in reality, there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. ...[it] causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering [the] prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims.”
― Martha Nussbaum

“To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“It's very dangerous to believe people, I haven't for years.”
― Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell