Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
—Elinor Glyn (British Novelist)
Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?
—Jean Anouilh (French Playwright)
It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins.
—Norm Phelps (American Animal Rights Activist)
Inspiration is the act of drawing the chair up to the writing table.
—Orhan Pamuk (Turkish Author)
To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
—A. J. Ayer (English Philosopher)
No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan (American Academic, Politician)
Since it is not granted to us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.
—Pliny the Younger (Roman Senator, Writer)
Some people bear three kinds of trouble—all they ever had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.
—Edward Everett Hale (American Unitarian Clergyman)
Caution is the parent of safety.
—Common Proverb
Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.
—Henry Mayhew (English Journalist)
As for courage and will—we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead.
—Andre Norton (American Science Fiction Writer)
Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
—Dylan Thomas (Welsh Poet)
It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.
—Yuval Noah Harari (Israeli Historian)
Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.
—Isabel Allende (Chilean Novelist)
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.
—James Salter (American Fiction Writer)
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
—John Fowles (English Novelist)