138 Quotes by Wilbur Smith

You don’t turn out as many books as I did then by sitting around, being cozy with the family.

Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you’ll mostly fall flat on your face, because it’s impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That’s how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It’s hard work.

Robin Hood was also a terrorist – but he had some style and a little class.

Play the game without mercy, play to win.

As they slithered up the muddy bank, scores of tiny silver fish that had been feasting on the open wounds were slow to relinquish their hold and were drawn out with the carcasses. Stranded upon the mud-banks, they flopped and quivered like stars that had fallen to earth.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it’s my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

A man follows the path laid out for him. He does his duty to God and his King. He does what he must do, not what pleases him. God’s truth, boy, what kind of world would this be if every man did what pleased him alone? Who would plough the fields and reap the harvest, if every man had the right to say, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ In this world there is a place for every man, but every man must know his place.

If I have to die, then it’s best to do so before I see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed.

Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.