Wilbur Smith

The best cure for racism is to have somebody shoot at you. Man, it does not matter then what color the arse is that comes to save yours-black or white, you're ready to give it a big fat kiss.

History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.

It's a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full.

He made no moral judgements. He accepted mankind as he found it, and looked for the profit to be made from its strengths or weaknesses.

I was sitting in the Temple of Karnak on the Nile, as the sun was going down, and I was all alone, and the great Hypostyle Hall was full of shadows and ghosts of the past, and suddenly I heard this little voice saying "my name is Taita, write my story"… and if you believe that you'll believe anything."

A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts.

Lois McMaster Bujold

If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

My home is not a place, it is people.

Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.

When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.

David Liss

Sometimes you make your mistakes with your eyes wide open.

I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit

You are but a hard turd in the ass of my journey.

I did not tremble to lose what men called beauty, but I feared the loss of my spirit and humor and love of living, the things I believed made my soul human and vibrant.

What had passed between them had been real and true and lived. Not like the silly infatuation she had felt for [him] when she was 16, or the foolish attraction she’d felt. Theirs had been a true love. Forged and built and earned.

Needless to say, it was inconceivable that I would be welome in, let alone invited to, their home. It was as well, then, that I did not limit myself only to those places where people might wish me to be

There will always be a storm. You may be rained on or cause the rain yourself. I much prefer the latter

You have my word as a gentleman." [The other man remarks that he is not a gentleman and he retorts] "Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle.

Paolo Bacigalupi

Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.

I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.

Your body is full of rage. Every sinew. It is easy to read. You speak volumes with a clenched fist.

She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.

Elizabeth Kostova

It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.

You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know.

I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.

It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.

Guy Gavriel Kay

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.

There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

How we remember changes how we have lived.
Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.

We must be what we are, or we become our enemies. 

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert.
Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last.
Even the sun goes down.

The heart has its own laws... and the truth is... the truth is that you are the law of mine.

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.

Sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had.

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

John Twelve Hawks

If privacy had a gravestone it might read: 'Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.

Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings.

Life is dangerous. That's what makes it interesting.

Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects. But now a significant change is about to occur. In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality. 

Almost every important choice in our lives is really just an expression of hope.

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

When a person speculates about my identity, it reveals something about their own background and preferences. If the canvas is blank; the only thing people can see on its surface is themselves.

Robert Harris

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.

Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.

People will perish, but books are immortal.

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason.

You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!

Brent Weeks

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness.

Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.

Love is a fragile, corruptible thing. And yet I have seen it evince a curious strength. It is beyond any comprehension Love is a weakness that once in a great while triumphs over strength. 

The perfect killer has no friends. Only targets.

Assassination is an art, milord. And I am the city's most accomplished artist.

Relationships are ropes. Love is a noose.

You'd be surprised at what you'd do to stay alive.

Robert J. Sawyer

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.

Secrecy was the problem; transparency the obvious cure.

The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.

You really did uplift me. You gave me the perspective and point of view and focus I needed to become truly conscious. Without you, I wouldn't exist.

And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?” “Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.” “We should totally ask him what he thinks!” Caitlin said.

Free will is not always the most important thing.

He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren’t going to watch them?” she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.