Bryce Courtenay Quotes - Page 2

It's nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don't know something.

. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.

Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do.

Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.

The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.

As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one that is molded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.

I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.

My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.

what is a german? to say a man is a german, what is that? does it tell you if he is a good man? or a bad man? no, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is german. a man must think what he is inside. what he is on the outside, how can this matter?

It's not what a man does, it's what a man is that counts!

sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency

Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.

Sometimes, very occasionally, you do your best boxing with your mouth.

First with the head, then with the heart.

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.

It's been a privilege to write for you and to have you accept me as a storyteller in your lives, Now, as my story draws to an end, may I say only, `Thank you. You have been simply wonderful'.

I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.

I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream.

Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

It is better just to get on with the business of living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don't go pestering and begging and telling him all your stupid little sins, that way you will spoil his day.

I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.