Robertson Davies Thoughts

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.