Robertson Davies

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

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

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

As A general rule, people marry most happily with their own kind.

I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.

The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.

Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness.

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

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

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

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.

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.

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.

Some countries you love. Some countries you hate. Canada is a country you worry about.

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

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

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

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.

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

Happiness . . . is not something that can be demanded from life, and 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.

I WISH PEOPLE WEREN’T SO SET ON BEING THEMSELVES, WHEN THAT MEANS BEING A BASTARD.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

Readers of biographies like their meat rare.