Richard Nell > Richard's Quotes

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“The true punishment for the dishonest man is not that he is not trusted, but that he can trust no one else.”
― Sean Rodden, Whispers of War

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.”
― Gene Wolfe

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
― George Carlin

“What…do I want?” Ruka put his hands to his awful face and closed his golden eyes, shuddering with what could have been a laugh, or a sob. “I want a world where love is not a crime, Priestess, a world where children are not doomed to misery because they are different. I want only laws with mercy, and justice, and wisdom...but I will settle for your pink insides in my palm, and your brains on a rock.”
― Richard Nell, Kings of Paradise

“I mean, I know you’re a scribe and all, but you were at point blank range, Johnny. A child could have made that shot. A drunk, palsy child, with a broken hand. The bards will sing songs of that shot. You will live in legend, right next to me.” -Lamorak”
― Richard Nell, Rebellion of the Black Militia

“Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia

“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

“Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
― Joe Haldeman

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”
― Michael Crichton

“Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.”
― Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon

“To hell with it, he thought, I'll do what I always do. I'll make a great cloud of dirt, blood and tears until no one can move, or see. Then I'll charge my way through it because no one else has the balls.”
― Richard Nell, Devil of the 22nd

“Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don't notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly."
"I want to be a soldier. A hero."
"You'll grow out of it.”
― Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it”
― Roald Dahl

“I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.”
― Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing