Quotes from Bryce Courtenay

Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.

I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.

First with the head, then with the heart.

I'm going to die with my mind intact. And to me that is the most exciting way you could possibly die.

I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.

It's good to be a little frightened. It's good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss.

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.

Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.

One thing is certain in life. Just when things are going well, soon afterward they are certain to go wrong. It's just the way things are meant to be.

I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.

But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.

sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency

It's nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don't know something.

I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available.

The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.

I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.

It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.

Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.

. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.

Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.

Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.

As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one that is molded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.

In this world are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for man to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation. The searcher after truth must search with humanity. Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life. When a truth is not so important, it is better left as a mystery.

what is a german? to say a man is a german, what is that? does it tell you if he is a good man? or a bad man? no, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is german. a man must think what he is inside. what he is on the outside, how can this matter?