Mark Tilbury > Mark's Quotes

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“That's the one good thing about the human brain, it constantly revises the past, cutting bits here, adding bits there, presenting it in an even more palatable way - the way we would have liked things to have been, rather than the way they really are.”
― Peter James, Perfect People

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
― Benjamin Franklin Wade

“Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.”
― Philip Sidney, Astrophel And Stella

“Writing can take you to places you’ve never been, introduce you to people you’ve never met, take you back to when you first saw those shadows in your room, when you first heard the sounds mumbling ever so softly from your closet, and it can show you what uttered them. It can scare the hell out of you, and that’s when you know it’s good.”
― J.D. Barker

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”
― Mark Twain

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
― Mark Twain

“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

“Confucius say if man want to grow one row of corn, first must shovel one ton of shit.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
― Mark Twain

“The concrete floor beneath the airbed was hard and uncompromising, digging into her back and making it difficult to breathe. The stale air reeked of disinfectant and shit. And something else that she couldn't quite place. Death, perhaps?”
― Mark Tilbury, The Eyes of the Accused

“The media is the right arm of anarchy.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it. Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don’t even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don’t want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I’ll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it.”
― Tarryn Fisher, Marrow

“I will continue to write what I love to read, and the fact that it doesn't sell as well as romance or sci-fi or fantasy isn't the point.”
― Joanna Penn

“Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid. ”
― Dean Koontz

“If you disaprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It's what I have.”
― Stephen King , On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.”
― Dean Koontz

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Can I? Yeah. You bet I can. There's a million things in this world can't do. Couldn't hit a curve ball, even back in high school. Can't fix a leaky faucet. Can't roller-skate or make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit. I have tried twice to be married and couldn't do it either time. But if you want me to take you away, to scare you or involve you or make you cry or grin, yeah. I can. I can bring it to you and keep bringing it until you holler uncle. I am able. I CAN.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“Fear is the enemy, fear is the foe, if you run before it down you’ll go. But if you stand and look it in the face, God will pour into you the bravery of grace.”
― Catherine Cookson, The Tide of Life

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“A writer is a messenger for the subconscious.”
― Mark Tilbury