Mark > Mark's Quotes

“Do not place too much importance on coincidences. Plenty of people are interested in astrology, nudism and Baudelaire.”
― Bosco Maria Angelica

“When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.”
― C.S. Forester, The African Queen

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.”
― Robert Graves

“For those she liked she did things; to those she didn't like she did other things.”
― Manly Wade Wellman, Fearful Rock, and Other Precarious Locales

“People that trust themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their throats cut.”
― Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase

“If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.”
― John Collier

“If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either”
― James M. Cain

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham