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I am a closet birdwatcher. I can identify Southern African species, but it irks me I can barely tell a jay from a blackbird in the U.K.

Wilbur Smith

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Wilbur Smith
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: January 9
Mathematician
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Broken Hill
Wilbur Addison Smith
Tell
Blackbirds
Closet
Closets
Barely
Identify
Southern
African
Species
Blackbird

More quotes by Wilbur Smith

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Politicians all over the world cater to domestic vote banks. They will spend only on what their constituents want. So unless there is a grass root green movement in a nation the politicians will not be willing to spend money on curbing emissions. More awareness is needed amongst the people to effect the real change in how governments spend.
Wilbur Smith
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I put my soul into every book I write.
Wilbur Smith
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I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I'm a manipulator as well.
Wilbur Smith
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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.
Wilbur Smith
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Litigation only makes lawyers fat.
Wilbur Smith
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I read all of Rider Haggard's books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I'm delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that's exactly what I am.
Wilbur Smith
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Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.
Wilbur Smith
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I'm not a prophet I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.
Wilbur Smith
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When I vacate this sack of old bones I won't care what you do with it. Bury or burn it but don't make much fuss.
Wilbur Smith
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Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.
Wilbur Smith
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Sometimes it is best for men not to attempt to interfere with destiny. Our prayers can be answered in ways which we do not expect and do not welcome.
Wilbur Smith
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I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.
Wilbur Smith
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I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind.
Wilbur Smith
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I grew up in Rhodesia on my father's ranch and every year he used to take us on safari in some remote area of the wilderness.
Wilbur Smith
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You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.
Wilbur Smith
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I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.
Wilbur Smith
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People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.
Wilbur Smith
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I write my books in my head, and not in a specific study with a view. The view is from my inner eyes.
Wilbur Smith
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History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.
Wilbur Smith
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beware of your most implacable enemy-yourself.
Wilbur Smith