59 Quotes by Iain Pears

For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous and that she should rest content with what she had, but she knew an emptiness deep inside her, which began to ache.

Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.

Life, like a good painting, needs balance, a harmonious arrangement to avoid being chaotic, a mess, a failure.

A hundred francs! Oh, dear me! It is worth millions of francs, my child. But my -- dealer -- here tells me that in fact a picture is worth only what someone will give for it. How much money do you have?"Julia took out her purse and counted. "Four francs and twenty sous," she said, looking up at him sadly."Is that all the money you have in the world?"She nodded."Then four francs and twenty sous it is.

Father is a school manqué ... He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.

Virtue comes through contemplation of the divine, and the exercise of philosophy. But it also comes through public service. The one is incomplete without the other. Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless.

She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring.

All you have to do is give people what they want, reflect themselves back into their own eyes, and they will fall over to crush money into your outstretched hand.

The painter without the critic is nothing. The good critic can make the mediocre famous, the great obscure. His power is limitless; the artist is his servant, and one day will recognize the fact.