Best Novelists Quotes

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

Courage is grace under pressure.

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

Serenity comes from the ability to say Yes to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say No to the wrong choices made by others.

Wherever I am, if I’ve got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn’t deceive anybody. It’s the deceivers who make you feel bad.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Get the hell out of my way!

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

Never take anything for granted.

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They’re generally smarter and more interesting, but they’re often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.