R.S. > R.S.'s Quotes

“Truth is a hard master, and costly to serve, but it simplifies all problems.”
― Ellis Peters

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“A man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.”
― Mary Renault

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon

That night he had a stomach ache.”
― Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.”
― Tom Sharpe, Wilt On High

“The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "The Mill on the Floss" to Motor Mechanics.”
― Tom Sharpe, Wilt

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Lookin' back is a bad habit.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“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

“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

“A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators. ”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.”
― Ovid

“It's a kindness that the mind can go where it wishes.”
― Publius Ovidius Naso, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

“The comfort zone is always the most desirable place to be. But in settling for comfort, there is a price to pay and it comes in the death of ambition, of hope, of youth and the death of self.”
― Simon Barnes

“Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.”
― Paul Theroux

“He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.”
― Paul Theroux

“Just when you’ve squared up to the solemn realisation that life is a bitch, it turns round and does something nice, just to confuse you. - Emily Spitzer, The Better Mousetrap”
― Tom Holt

“Mostly I sit at home in the evenings watching the box and hoping that one day I'll evolve into plankton.”
― Tom Holt, Barking

“The conscientious arsonist doesn't just set the building on fire; first he fills the fire extinguishers with petrol.”
― Tom Holt, Open Sesame

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“I like to make blank pages darker. It's this thing I do.”
― Rob E. Boley

“Snow came back, but she didn't come back right.”
― Rob E. Boley, That Risen Snow: Snow White & Zombies

“The local natives were particularly curious to know why the English required such huge quantities of pepper and there was much scratching of heads until it was finally agreed that English houses were so cold that the walls were plastered with crushed pepper in order to produce heat.”
― Giles Milton, Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History