Mbuye

“If you’d fortified yourself as regularly as I have you’d not be giving twopence about telling your mother you’re going to be married. What is it gives me the necessary sagacity to outwit the Inspector? Whisky. What is it that helps me to know just where to put down the net in Loch Sleeport for Waggett’s sea-trout? Whisky. What makes me a good shot at a grouse or a snipe? Whisky. What is it makes Maclaren such a hell of a good doctor? Whisky. Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whisky makes it go round twice as fast.”
― Compton Mackenzie, Whisky Galore

“The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement: A Novel

“you like crises, and things that blow up and moments of truth – you don’t like people. You’re never kind to your characters, or sympathize with them, or excuse them, and make them human.”
― A. S. Byatt

“Childhood is so large an area, and seems interminable, so that all that had been possible had been to wait quietly, from day to day, like a prisoner whose life sentence, although he knows that he may be released eventually if he behaves well and does not die first, seems to surround him completely, to cut him off from any future and any brightness there may be.”
― A. S Byatt, Shadow of a sun: A novel