James > James's Quotes

“Rare is the man who can outrun his own fate”
― James Vella-Bardon

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
― Mark Twain

“I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Never trust a man who reads only one book.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Purity of Blood

“I'm never bored. Only people bore me, so I avoid them”
― Dexter Petley

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
― T.S. Eliot

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“He spoke kindly, "Remember, wine is from grapes, grapes from seeds, the seeds from the soil."
"You are speaking of alchemy?"
"Not of alchemy but the secret to survival. Just as substances change, human beings must change.”
― M. C. Dulac

“In my experience, writers tend to be really good at the inside of their own heads and imaginary people, and a lot less good at the stuff going on outside, which means that quite often if you flirt with us we will completely fail to notice, leaving everybody involved slightly uncomfortable and more than slightly unlaid.

So I would suggest that any attempted seduction of a writer would probably go a great deal easier for all parties if you sent them a cheerful note saying "YOU ARE INVITED TO A SEDUCTION: Please come to dinner on Friday Night, Wear the kind of clothes you would like to be seduced in."

And alcohol may help, too. Or kissing. Many writers figure out that they're being seduced or flirted with if someone is actually kissing them.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I'm more preoccupied with furnishing my head than the place where I live. The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones.”
― Yann Martel, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios