Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I have never written out of a desire to be controversial. "

Related Quotes:

" I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn't be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them - but there's no way I was touching those bugs. "

" I'd like to think life has improved since 1850, despite the long hours we all seem to spend slaving over hot computers, but the psychological journeys remain the same - the search for love, identity, a meaningful place in the world. "

" Every day a piano doesn't fall on my head is good luck. "

" Nowadays, I only review books I really like. It's cowardly, I know, but I figure it's not my job to make people unhappy. I'll leave that to the professionals. "

" Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life. "

" In the odd moment when I am not thinking about horses, I write books. "

" I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should. "

" I know from experience that careers do not always arise from a deep sense of destiny. "

" I think most people struggle over a matter of years to find a satisfying way to live. "

" The truth about love is that you don't always fall in love with whom you are supposed to fall in love with. Love just hits you. It is a transcendent thing. Sometimes it is your best friend's husband and sometimes it's your father. It's weird. But that's a fact of life. "

" Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one. "

" People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry. "

" Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. "

" There's an overwhelming sense of paranoia in the suburbs. People there seem so much more paranoid to me than people in the city about their kids being kidnapped or their parties being raided or their drinks being spiked. There's a kind of hysteria about that. "

" My daughter is a fantastic travelling companion - she's totally organised, whereas I'm hopeless. "

" In my experience, adults rarely bother reading the reviews of children's books and almost never read the books themselves - particularly if they don't have children. "

" I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens. "

" Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on. "

" The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you're trying to tell them. "

" While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps. "

" As a person with the retentive mental capacity of a goldfish and a dislike of repetition, I frequently make use of the thesaurus built into my Microsoft Word U.K. Software. "

" Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror. "

" I loved horses and horse books as a child. "

" I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields. "

" My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind. "

" I'm not sure I can write about America for the same reason I'm not sure I can write about adults - I have no critical distance on either place. "

" The more you live, the better writer you are. "

" One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books. "

" I lived in New York for 10 years, and every New Yorker sees a shrink. "

" Life doesn't go on forever, and you don't want to drop dead without ever having done what you wanted to do. "