Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

Charles Dickens

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Charles Caleb Colton

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Charles Dickens

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.

Charles Spurgeon

Beware, I pray thee, of presuming that thou art saved. If thy heart be renewed, if thou shalt hate the things that thou didst once love, and love the things that thou didst once hate; if thou hast really repented; if there be a thorough change of mind in thee; if thou be born again, then hast thou reason to rejoice: but if there be no vital change, no inward godliness; if there be no love to God, no prayer, no work of the Holy Spirit, then thy saying "I am saved" is but thine own assertion, and it may delude, but it will not deliver thee.

Charles Spurgeon

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Charles Spurgeon

Come boldly, 'O believer, for despite the whisperings of Satan and the doubtings of thine own heart, thou art greatly beloved.

Alanis Morissette

I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason why I live, breathe, and exist is, that it's my duty to be as honest as possible in my art.

Charles Caleb Colton

A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.

Charles Caleb Colton

The French revolution was a .eune invented and constructed for the purpose of manufacturing liberty; but it had neither lever cogs, nor adjusting powers, and the consequences were that it worked so rapidly that it destroyed its own inventors, and set itself on fire.

Charles Caleb Colton

In most quarrels there is a fault on both sides. A quarrel may be compared to a spark, which cannot be produced without a flint, as well as steel. Either of them may hammer on wood forever; no fire will follow.

Charles Dickens

‎And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire.

Charles Dickens

All through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire- a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.

Charles Dickens

I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him; in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.

Charles Simmons

Malice can always find a mark to shoot at, and a pretence to fire.

Alan Jackson

Making music is still what keeps a fire going on in me.

David Sedaris

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.

Charles Stross

I don't do flash fiction.

China Mieville

I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

China Mieville

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

China Mieville

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

David Morrell

There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them.

David Mitchell

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Kurt Vonnegut

What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.

Edith Wharton

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.