Alistair Maclean Quotes

#1. We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#2. You're breathtaking," he explained. "All you have to do is stand there and breathe and the earth beneath my feet moves.

Quinn Loftis

#3. That was my favorite dagger.
She had a favorite dagger? Seriously? And she thought that I was a freak.

Jennifer Estep

#4. Either way, the vulnerable human ego is protected. Protected from the corrupting influence of praise. Protected from the corrosive effects of shame.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#5. A terrified rat will swear to anything.

Alistair MacLean

#6. I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.

Alistair MacLean

#7. We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.

Alistair MacLean

#8. A story that began with, and exists because of, my love of the remoter parts of Scotland, where the bones of the Earth show through, and the sky is a pale white, and it's all astoundingly beautiful, and it feels about as remote as any place can possibly be.

Neil Gaiman

#9. Imperfection is simply not a good enough excuse to have someone keep hurting you just because they feel like it.

Pandora Poikilos

#10. The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.

Arnold Kling

#11. I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing.

Alistair MacLean

#12. I should have listened to Hunslett. Again I should have listened to Hunslett. And again for Hunslett's sake. But I didn't know then that Hunslett was to have time for all the sleep in the world.

Alistair MacLean

#13. She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.

Alistair MacLean

#14. Time to release the kraken, Mr Fenton,

A.W. Exley

#15. Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they'd comb their hair on the way down.

Alistair MacLean

#16. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?

Michael Gruber

#17. The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn't the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.

Alistair MacLean

#18. This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words."Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.

Alistair MacLean

#19. what would be left of it by that time - would be in the Kola

Alistair MacLean

#20. The point I make is simply that cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world.

Alistair MacLean

#21. I am not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do. No mystique.

Alistair MacLean

#22. There was such a thing as luck, but to acknowledge its existence was to hold two fingers up to fate.

Alistair MacLean

#23. Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.

Anna Deavere Smith