Robertson Davies Quotes

If you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.

If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creatures, let him begin the long, solitary process of perfecting himself.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.

If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.

No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.

To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread.

Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular.

One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground—not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

If you don’t hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you’ll get.

As I once said of George Bernard Shaw, he bloomed at twenty, but nobody smelled him till he was forty.

Ah that blessed degree that stamps us for life as creatures of guaranteed intellectual worth.

Inactivity and deprivation of all accustomed stimulus is not rest; it is a preparation for the tomb.

If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.

Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.

The dog is a Yes-animal, very popular with people who can't afford to keep a Yes-man.

The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.

A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

Whether you are really right or not doesn't matter; it's the belief that counts.

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.

Experience is wine, and art is the brandy we distill from it.

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

Biography at its best is a form of fiction.

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them...

Trollope is endlessly gripping, though it's rather crunchy granola: you chomp your way resolutely through it, and it's worth it because the story is so good.

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.

I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat.

I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.

It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way.