Quotes from Susan Howatch

The advantage of telling the truth is that one is so much more likely to sound convincing.

practice makes perfect and although God did create Adam he was more accomplished when the time came for him to create Eve.

Life's not about the day when you win the prizes - it's about all the days in between. p 255

Science destroys only the false ideas about religion; the true ideas it complements and explores.)

There's a pattern. Never, never doubt that there's a pattern. There's a pattern always. Everywhere. In everyone.

Think of me as the porter . . . and consider the possiblity that life might be less exhausting if you unloaded some of your bags on to my empty trolley.

There is no timetable for grief," said Bronwen Morgan. "Grief isn't a train which you catch at the station. Grief has its own time, and grief's time is beyond time, and time itself … isn't very important.

I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families.

The very rich are no different; they just have more money. The real difference in this world is not between the rich and the poor but between those who create and those incapable of creation.

My first recommendation...will be that you should have a holiday. You are worn out by all your unhappiness.

and daughters who are so hopeless at doing the done thing and sticking to the rules are automatically paralyzed with guilt whenever they come within fifty yards of a mother like Margaret.

Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and to become the person God's designed him to be.

I was ten years old when I first saw the inheritance and twenty years old when I first saw Janna Roslyn, but my reaction to both was identical. I wanted them.

What could be more rational than the decision to use my gifts in a way which would most clearly manifest my moral and intellectual convictions?' My

Better to live in the truth, however terrible, than to murder your true self by living a lie.

Fact number two: all women basically want to be wives and mothers—' 'No, honey, they don't. Sorry, but they just don't. My fifty per cent of the human race isn't a bunch of identical plastic dolls. We're human beings and we're all different and – incredible though this may seem to you – we don't all want the same thing

Of all the great empires the world has known, ours will be the shortest. Two hundred years of chasing the Godalmighty Dollar, and what do we produce? The A-Bomb and I Love Lucy.

but a show of force by the mightiest nation on earth isn't going to do anything except convince them that their attitudes are worth holding on to. Soon they'll be martyrs and world opinion will think the British Empire nothing but a big bully too fond of waving the big stick.

Nobody is more of a patriot than I am, but I've very little confidence in politicians and even less confidence in wars.

One wonders what would happen in a society where there were no rules to break. Doubtlessly everyone would quickly die of boredom.

It's really most remarkable how the human race is so seldom satisfied with what it's got. Give a man the world and he's still pining for the moon.

You've asked enough questions about evil. But you never asked once about love." So I asked him to tell me about it, but of course his definition lay beyond words. He just went on sitting with me in the dark and taking the weight of my pain.

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated.

You have a right to be angry, but you mustn't turn that anger back on yourself because that only compounds the damage which has already been done. You must turn the anger outwards.