A.J. Cronin Quotes

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build their philosophy of life.

The virtue of achievement is victory over oneself. Those who know this can never know defeat.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

Some temptations cannot be fought. One must close one's mind and fly from them

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

That is life... to begin again when everything is lost!

We cannot measure Divine Providence by the yardstick of human mentality.

Even if my country remains in war with yours. . .remember. . . i am not your enemy.

[Once plans for each eventuality are resolved, further] Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, but only saps today of its strength.

Funny... I still can't believe in God." "Does that matter now?"..."He believes in you.

You are extraordinarily attractive to women. And your greatest charm is that you do not realise it.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

Hell is the place where one has ceased to hope.

Religions are many, reason is one, we are all brothers.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

Nothing is more limiting than a closed circle of acquaintanceship where every avenue of conversation has been explored and social exchanges are fixed in a known routine.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

As a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution?

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

Four hundred thousand South Africans are dying of AIDS every year. This makes the war on Iraq look like a birthday party.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.

And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.

Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

Miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to.

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

A season is a season, regardless of the number of games.

I used to pull rank and wait until the wind was blowing out.

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.

The sadness you feel is not your own. It's his sadness you feel in your heart, Amy, for missing you.

She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

I like creating villains.

I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars' homes, but that's the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.

I was very much a child of the Cold War.