Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...

Charles Caleb Colton

Genius, in one respect, is like gold; numbers of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is curious that some learned dunces, because they can write nonsense in languages that are dead, should despise those that talk sense in languages that are living.

Charles Caleb Colton

He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.

Charles Caleb Colton

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

Charles Caleb Colton

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

Charles Caleb Colton

We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.

Charles Caleb Colton

The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.

Charles Caleb Colton

When I meet with any persons who write obscurely or converse confusedly, I am apt to suspect two things; first, that such persons do not understand themselves; and secondly, that they are not worthy of being understood by others.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Billy Bob Thornton

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Aleksandar Hemon

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

A. S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Luke Mitchell

I never did drama at school. I did it for one term, when it was compulsory, and I hated it. Tennis was the main thing in my life, and I was not open to anything else. When I removed tennis from the equation, I didn't know who I was.

Benjamin Franklin

Those who are fear'd, are hated.

Bertrand Russel

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery

Fritz Lang

I was something that is always hated in Hollywood - a perfectionist; nobody likes a perfectionist, you know.

George Benson

I've always hated rejection; I only want to go out there when I know I've got it right.

Chris Squire

I couldn't get session work because most musicians hated my style.

Clive Sinclair

I had a Latin master who, for no rational reason whatsoever - I was a very quiet kid at school - just hated me.

Elsa Peretti

I hated modeling. I was so scared. But as soon as I started doing jewelry, I did better as a model.

Gareth Bale

I was never too much into school. I liked lunchtimes and breaks, but nah, I hated sitting at a desk. I was always looking out of the window, looking at my watch, thinking about when I could play football.