Bryce Courtenay quotes

Always listen to yourself... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. (Bryce Courtenay)

Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance. -Doc.

Bryce Courtenay

Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.

Bryce Courtenay

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.

Bryce Courtenay

Never take advice from a donkey.

Bryce Courtenay

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.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.

Bryce Courtenay

You've got to be quick on your feet in this world if you want to survive. Though once you know the rules, it is not too hard to play the game.

Bryce Courtenay

Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do.

Bryce Courtenay

Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it. (Bryce Courtenay)

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

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.

Bryce Courtenay

Sometimes, very occasionally, you do your best boxing with your mouth.

Bryce Courtenay

If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

First with the head, then with the heart, you'll be ahead from the start.

Bryce Courtenay

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

Bryce Courtenay

Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise. (Bryce Courtenay)

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

Bryce Courtenay

I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.

Bryce Courtenay

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

Bryce Courtenay

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.

Bryce Courtenay

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Bryce Courtenay

Bryce Courtenay - Image

Photo: Yahoo! Blog from Sunnyvale, California, USA, CC BY 2.0

Occupation: South African Novelist
Born: August 14, 1933
Died: November 22, 2012
Quotes count: 26

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