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I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

Bryce Courtenay

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Bryce Courtenay
Age: 79 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 1
Died: 2012
Died: November 22
Novelist
Johannesburg
Gauteng
South Africa
Arthur Bryce Courtenay
Believe
Soon
Lies
Lying
Tell

More quotes by Bryce Courtenay

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Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.
Bryce Courtenay
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Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.
Bryce Courtenay
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The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.
Bryce Courtenay
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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
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Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.
Bryce Courtenay
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It's good to be a little frightened. It's good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss.
Bryce Courtenay
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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
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It is better just to get on with the business of living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don't go pestering and begging and telling him all your stupid little sins, that way you will spoil his day.
Bryce Courtenay
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Let me conclude by saying in my experience the glittering prizes in life come more to those who persevere despite setback and disappointment than they do to the exceptionally gifted who, with the confidence of the talents bestowed upon them, often pursue the tasks leading to success with less determination.
Bryce Courtenay
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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
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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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I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.
Bryce Courtenay
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The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, ofen well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better.
Bryce Courtenay
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I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.
Bryce Courtenay
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. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.
Bryce Courtenay
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sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency
Bryce Courtenay
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First with the head, then with the heart.
Bryce Courtenay
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I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream.
Bryce Courtenay
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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
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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