James Herriot Quotes

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

I hope to make people realize how totally helpless animals are, how dependent on us, trusting as a child must that we will be kind and take care of their needs.

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.

If you decide to become a veterinary surgeon you will never grow rich, but you will have a life of endless interest and variety.

Animals are unpredictable things, and so our life is unpredictable. It's a long tale of little triumphs and disasters and you've got to really like it to stick it.

I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love.

No animal is a better judge of comfort than a cat.

I wish people would realize that animals are totally dependent on us, helpless, like children, a trust that is put upon us.

Dogs like to obey. It gives them security.

And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly

I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.

I could do terrible things to people who dump unwanted animals by the roadside.

A farmer once told me one of the greatest luxuries of his life was to wake up early only to go back to sleep again.

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

If I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.

I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much – in just standing and staring.

For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.

I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can't remember what happened a couple of days ago.

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.

It was Sunday morning (one a.m.), a not unusual time for some farmers, after a late Saturday night, to have a look round their stock and decide to send for the vet.

I will write another book if I feel like it.

They can't find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.