Top 86 Bryce Courtenay Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Bryce Courtenay

#1. Humans best survive when they are given a purpose; a common enemy to defeat, revenge to wreak or a dream to cling to.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#3. You've got to be quick on your feet in this world if you want to survive. Though once you know the rules, it is not too hard to play the game.

Bryce Courtenay

#4. But I started to realize that it doesn't begin like this, that anybody can be the target for prejudice, all you have to be is "too" something . Too short, too fat, too clever, too big, too small, too slow, too new, "too different" from what others think of as normal.

Bryce Courtenay

#5. The imagination is always the best torturer.

Bryce Courtenay

#6. Every man is an island and at the same time also robinson crusoe.

Bryce Courtenay

#7. I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available.

Bryce Courtenay

#8. A sentiment, coming from it is not to be trusted.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#10. Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad.

Bryce Courtenay

#11. In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.

Bryce Courtenay

#12. I Shall Never Surrender.

Bryce Courtenay

#13. One thing is certain in life. Just when things are going well, soon afterward they are certain to go wrong. It's just the way things are meant to be.

Bryce Courtenay

#14. First with the head, then with the heart

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#16. The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.

Bryce Courtenay

#17. Then I felt like having a piss and I did that

Bryce Courtenay

#18. I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

Bryce Courtenay

#19. I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#21. The time we are given for parenting is so short, passes so quickly and is jumbled up with so many other priorities and disruptions that, in the end, we come to doubt that we used it in the best interests of our children.

Bryce Courtenay

#22. Turning to Ann Gower, she smiled. "You're a good woman, Ann Gower."
Ann Gower drew back and looked askance at Mary. "Don't you go ruinin' me reputation, Mary Abacus. I be a real bad woman, but a bloody good whore, and you knows it!

Bryce Courtenay

#23. 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.

Bryce Courtenay

#24. It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.

Bryce Courtenay

#25. A man on the run finds compassion or loveor even pretended innocence his greatest source of danger.

Bryce Courtenay

#26. Always listen to yourself ... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention.

Bryce Courtenay

#27. I'm going to die with my mind intact. And to me that is the most exciting way you could possibly die.

Bryce Courtenay

#28. 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.

Bryce Courtenay

#29. Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.

Bryce Courtenay

#30. I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.

Bryce Courtenay

#31. Without courage, there is no luck and no hope. He who dares, wins.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#33. The rich become rich by taking, and the poor by giving.

Bryce Courtenay

#34. First with the head and then with the heart.

Bryce Courtenay

#35. As a small child I had discovered that only two places are available to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a nonentity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow.

Bryce Courtenay

#36. Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance.
-Doc

Bryce Courtenay

#37. Small can beat big, but you must have a plan.

Bryce Courtenay

#38. Around a proposition or an idea or story willingly. Some

Bryce Courtenay

#39. 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.

Bryce Courtenay

#40. If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.

Bryce Courtenay

#41. Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.

Bryce Courtenay

#42. He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers".

Bryce Courtenay

#43. And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon and laughing up at the stars, this, Peekay, is heaven.

Bryce Courtenay

#44. In each of us there is a flame that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it burns within us, we cannot be destroyed.

Bryce Courtenay

#45. is intended to break the spirit, to render harmless those who are thought to be harmful.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#48. 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?

Bryce Courtenay

#49. 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.

Bryce Courtenay

#50. My only desire is to teach the word o' man and leave the word o' Gawd to the pulpit men

Bryce Courtenay

#51. Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going.

Bryce Courtenay

#52. Love is energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed. It just is and always will be, giving meaning to life and direction to goodness ... Love will never die.

Bryce Courtenay

#53. It's good to be a little frightened. It's good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss.

Bryce Courtenay

#54. In this world there are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for man to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation.

Bryce Courtenay

#55. I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.

Bryce Courtenay

#56. I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#58. Sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency

Bryce Courtenay

#59. Mix the head with the heart, and you're ahead from the start.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#61. Never take advice from a donkey.

Bryce Courtenay

#62. Generosity overpowers greed.

Bryce Courtenay

#63. My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love.

Bryce Courtenay

#64. You can't go feeding your hate on the past, it's not natural.

Bryce Courtenay

#65. The Tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices

Bryce Courtenay

#66. Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man.

Bryce Courtenay

#67. The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.

Bryce Courtenay

#68. I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#70. I spoke the language the sentences that had lied their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the worlds first concentration camps.

Bryce Courtenay

#71. When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.

Bryce Courtenay

#72. Dare your genius to walk the wildest unknown ways.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

#74. Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been

Bryce Courtenay

#75. Words are like diamonds. Polish them too much, and all you get are pebbles.

Bryce Courtenay

#76. Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!

Bryce Courtenay

#77. I felt clean, all the bone-beaked loneliness birds banished, their rocky nests turned to river stones. Cool, clear water bubbled over them, streams in the desert.

Bryce Courtenay

#78. 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.

Bryce Courtenay

#79. Boldness, at first a stranger to be treated with caution, soon becomes a friend, then a partner, and finally taken for granted, as is the daily relationship between married people.

Bryce Courtenay

#80. The joy of a small town lies in its unchanging nature.

Bryce Courtenay

#81. Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.

Bryce Courtenay