70 Quotes by Shirley Hazzard

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

What you fear most will happen to you – that is the law.

The tragedy is not that love doesn’t last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might – without abating their transgressions – go to church; a place made remote – by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself – from the risk of intense public involvement.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing – articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you’re writing.

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground – or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

For most people it’s easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.

He worked in Interim Reports, before being upgraded to Annual Reports.