Garnette > Garnette's Quotes

“The Viscount stepped into the room. "Came to see if you was dead," he said. "Laid Pom odds you weren't."
Lethbridge passed his hand across his eyes. "I'm not," he replied in a faint voice.
"No. I'm sorry," said the Viscount simply. He wandered over to the table and sat down. "Horry said she killed you, Pom said So she might, I said No. Nonsense."
Lethbridge still holding a hand to his aching head tried to pull himself together. "Did you?" he said. His eyes ran over his self invited guest. "I see. Let me assure you once more that I am very much alive."
"Well I wish you'd put your wig on," complained the Viscount. "What I want to know is why did Horry hit you on the head with a poker?"
Lethbridge gingerly felt his bruised scalp. "With a poker was it? Pray ask her, though I doubt if she will tell you."
"You shouldn't keep the front door open," said the Viscount. "What's to stop people coming in and hitting you over the head? It's preposterous."
"I wish you'd go home," said Lethbridge wearily.
The Viscount surveyed the supper-table with a knowing eye.
"Card-party?" he inquired.”
― Georgette Heyer, The Convenient Marriage

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
― Willa Cather

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“ I am glad when we enter the conference room that Chihiro made sure I wasn’t late to the meeting. Not only does my appearance cut short several whispered confabs in the corners of the room (confirming her suspicion that people would have used my lateness as a chance to talk about me), but I also get to take my favorite seat: at the far end of the table next to my favorite monkey.

I’ve never quite understood how the monkeys got here. The fresco on the ceiling of this room –originally the formal dining room- is modeled on the one in the formal dining room at La Civetta. It depicts a lemon-covered pergola in a garden. An assortment of birds –doves, sparrows, and long-tailed peacocks – roost on the wooden struts. In the original fresco, fat cupids also frolic amidst the greenery, their chubby feet dangling precariously from their perches. In one corner a plaster foot even protrudes from the frescoed surface. In this New York version of the fresco, there are monkeys instead of cupids: monkeys peering out between leafy branches and monkeys dangling by their tails from the wooden slats of the pergola. If you look carefully (and I have had ample opportunity through long and tedious budget reviews to examine every inch of the palatial room), you can even find a few monkeys that have climbed down from the pergola and found their way into the formal dining room to perform rude and unspeakable acts... My favorite monkey, though, is the little one who peers out from behind the leafy fronds of an aspidistra, making an obscene gesture I have seen only on the streets of Italy. I always sit right next to him. He gives me some relief for the sentiments I am unable to express in the course of department meetings.”
― Carol Goodman

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“You never know when somebody will pull you to them.”
― Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“There are some works so luminous that they fill us with shame for the meager life to which we are resigned, that they implore us to lead another, wiser, fuller life; works so powerful that they give us strength, and force us to new undertakings. A book can play this role.”
― Hervé Le Tellier

“I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters