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I shot my first lion at the age of 14 when a pride threatened my father's livestock while he was away on holiday.

Wilbur Smith

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Wilbur Smith
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: January 9
Mathematician
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Broken Hill
Wilbur Addison Smith
Pride
Age
Livestock
Father
Lion
Away
Lions
Firsts
Threatened
First
Holiday
Shot
Shots

More quotes by Wilbur Smith

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A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts.
Wilbur Smith
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Herbert, my father, was born in Britain but went out to Africa in his teens to join his father and built up an 18,000-acre ranch in what was then Northern Rhodesia, providing work for the locals. He was my hero when I was a boy.
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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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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They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.
Wilbur Smith
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beware of your most implacable enemy-yourself.
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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There's nothing so aphrodisiacal for a woman as money and success.
Wilbur Smith
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What I like about writing is the sense of godlike power it gives you.
Wilbur Smith
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Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds.
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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I don't want children. Why should I let some strange little monster into my life to destroy what to me is a perfect set-up?
Wilbur Smith
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It's probably true that everyone has a book in them, although it may not be a very good one.
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 read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.
Wilbur Smith
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I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.
Wilbur Smith
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It's a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full.
Wilbur Smith
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My family wasn't terribly affluent and looked upon money very carefully as something that had to be saved, not spent. My father built the ducting that took air into the copper mines and made about 6 d a yard in the Thirties, which was good money back then.
Wilbur Smith
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Quite frankly, I think political correctness is the worst form of censorship. You're not allowed to speak your mind unless you're black, or unless you're a terrorist, or unless you're an Arab or a minority people. Then you can say what you like. But if you are like a lot of us you are not supposed to say certain things.
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