Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Wagner

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.

Charles Dickens

I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.

Charles Dickens

The aphorism "Whatever is, is right," would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.

Charles Caleb Colton

Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.

Charles Caleb Colton

Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils.

Charles Caleb Colton

No propagation or multiplication is more rapid that that of evil, unless it be checked; no growth more certain.

Charles Caleb Colton

Accustom yourself to submit on all and every occasion, and on the most minute, no less than on the most important circumstances of life, to a small present evil, to obtain a greater distant good. This will give decision, tone, and energy to the mind, which, thus disciplined, will often reap victory from defeat and honor from repulse.

Charles Dickens

Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.

Carl Barks

I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.

C. S. Lewis

But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.

Charles Dickens

Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Sandra Cisneros

One of my favorite writers is Hans Christian Anderson. His stories speak to the times.

Brent Spiner

Hollywood has more than its share of harsh and crewel stories. In fact, it's probably more the norm than the exception.

Bret Easton Ellis

Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.

Diane Setterfield

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

Diane Setterfield

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

Diane Setterfield

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

Carol Shields

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Charles Dickens

Novelties please less than they impress.

David Shields

My medium is prose, not the novel.

David Mitchell

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

David Mitchell

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

David Quammen

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Ellen Potter

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

John Irving

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

Jane Smiley

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