Kyle > Kyle's Quotes

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
― Abigail Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“In most crime novels the violent act, usually the murder, is the engine. Take that away and there is little left to drive the story along. So I do get a little cross with authors who aren’t precise about the violence they’re using to create tension because I feel they’re being dishonest with their readers. If people don’t like the blood and violence in my books, fine, they can always close the cover and put it aside and maybe read a romance instead. – Mo Hayder”
― Mo Hayder

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.”
― Dennis Lehane

“America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.”
― James Ellroy

“...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“Never say more than is necessary.”
― Richard Brinsley Sheridan

“Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“Going outside is highly overrated.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
― William Goldman, Four Screenplays with Essays: Marathon Man - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - The Princess Bride - Misery

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

“Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.”
― K.J. Parker, Devices and Desires

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.”
― Will Shortz

“There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.”
― S. M. Stirling

“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
― William Tecumseh Sherman

“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

“Though I often run out of courage and good sense, stubbornness keeps me going.”
― Simon R Green

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.”
― James Herriot, James Herriot's Cat Stories

“I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.”
― Harold Pinter, Betrayal

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
― Sharon Olds

“Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.”
― John Stewart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867