Top 100 Courtenay Quotes
#1. Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and Al Pacino made me want to act. I've always been interested in men with a vulnerable side.
Martin Freeman
#2. Your perfume. . .' His tone held a faint hint of surprise. 'I'd somehow expected you to wear something more. . .sultry. I don't recognize this fragrance.'
'It's new," Courtenay said tersely. 'It's called Get Lost. You've probably never encountered it before.
Grace Green
#3. 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
#4. 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
#7. There just doesn't seem to be a market for something with aspiration anymore.
Tom Courtenay
#8. It's nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don't know something.
Bryce Courtenay
#10. 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
#13. 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
#14. Sometimes, very occasionally, you do your best boxing with your mouth.
Bryce Courtenay
#15. I never did anything about my stardom, it never meant anything to me.
Tom Courtenay
#16. 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
#17. The Zenjirli inscriptions supply far more suggestive criteria, and show how cautious we must be in coming to conclusions respecting the unity of the Aramaic language. These inscriptions are in many ways more akin to Hebrew and Assyrian than to Aramaic.
John Courtenay James
#18. 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
#20. The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.
Bryce Courtenay
#21. 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
#22. I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream.
Bryce Courtenay
#23. I spoke the language the sentences that had lied their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the worlds first concentration camps.
Bryce Courtenay
#24. When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.
Bryce Courtenay
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. Around a proposition or an idea or story willingly. Some
Bryce Courtenay
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers".
Bryce Courtenay
#36. 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
#38. But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.
Bryce Courtenay
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The old actors in the old days, they used to go on tour, to get the play ready for the West End, and to learn their lines. The old timers used to say, "Be very careful, dear boy, what you get in to during the first weeks of a long tour."
Tom Courtenay
#42. I don't want to peak too early. The worry is that you never know until it's all over whether you peaked at all - and then you're finished and it's too late.
Tom Courtenay
#43. No one owns you, I know that. No one owns me. No one owns anyone. We just get to borrow each for a while.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
#45. Every man is an island and at the same time also robinson crusoe.
Bryce Courtenay
#47. 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
#49. Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.
Bryce Courtenay
#50. Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad.
Bryce Courtenay
#51. 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
#52. It's not what a man does, it's what a man is that counts!
Bryce Courtenay
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. My only desire is to teach the word o' man and leave the word o' Gawd to the pulpit men
Bryce Courtenay
#56. No one could tie you tighter than you could tie yourself and it was the ropes you couldn't see that bound you tightest.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. My now-wife - we got together in '81, we married a few years after - she's been very good in the past about going in the theater with me to see actresses I had known. But then, she's not an actress.
Tom Courtenay
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.
Bryce Courtenay
#65. People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.
Bryce Courtenay
#66. Sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency
Bryce Courtenay
#67. The answer was no, whatever her query was, except for those bits to which his answer was yes
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
#68. Mix the head with the heart, and you're ahead from the start.
Bryce Courtenay
#69. Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.
Bryce Courtenay
#71. The film business is absurd. Stars don't last very long. It's much more interesting to be a proper actor.
Tom Courtenay
#73. 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
#74. You can't go feeding your hate on the past, it's not natural.
Bryce Courtenay
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. It followed that every act, whether the finding of a new proof for a complex mathematical problem or a twist of vision that turned one school of art into another was a result of endless failure.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
#78. Words are like diamonds. Polish them too much, and all you get are pebbles.
Bryce Courtenay
#79. But where Moabite differed from Hebrew the difference pointed to Phoenician on the one side and to Arabic on the other, rather than Aramaic.
John Courtenay James
#80. The section of Aramaeans that pressed its way from the Euphrates southward, and drove the Edomites out of Petra, was afterwards known as Nabataean.
John Courtenay James
#81. 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
#83. It was still quite late when I got married, 30s, I don't know.
Tom Courtenay
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. My occupation has been a great deal with David Foster Wallace, and he didn't manage it, and he was very much looking for something that isn't totally selfish, and finding meaning. It's a struggle.
Tom Courtenay
#87. The joy of a small town lies in its unchanging nature.
Bryce Courtenay
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. It seemed certain now that small could defeat big. All it took was brains and skills and heart and a perfect plan.
Bryce Courtenay
#91. When a man knows somebody cares he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul clean and lit.
Bryce Courtenay
#92. Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do.
Bryce Courtenay
#93. Sweet potatoes in their jackets have a large comfort value built into them
Bryce Courtenay
#96. The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek.
John Courtenay James
#97. This is something particular to actors, especially in plays, and in films, too - but in plays, it's like, don't get involved with anyone in the play.
Tom Courtenay
#98. is intended to break the spirit, to render harmless those who are thought to be harmful.
Bryce Courtenay
#99. He was just one of those people ... one of a thousand expats who'd dragged their unhappiness to the other side of the world, expecting everything to be different, and never quite got over the fact it felt the same.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
#100. Besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.
Bryce Courtenay
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
