Quote

I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I'm a manipulator as well.

Wilbur Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wilbur Smith
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: January 9
Mathematician
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Broken Hill
Wilbur Addison Smith
Manipulator
Storyteller
Seen
Wells
Well
Good

More quotes by Wilbur Smith

Image
I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind.
Wilbur Smith
Image
I'm not a good father and they're not children any more the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.
Wilbur Smith
Image
Litigation only makes lawyers fat.
Wilbur Smith
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Wilbur Smith
Image
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
Image
Despite the fact that I spend a lot of time in London, Switzerland and New York, Africa is the place I know and love best, and my heart will always lie here.
Wilbur Smith
Image
I love the sea as much as I love the veldt of Africa.
Wilbur Smith
Image
I know it's politically incorrect but I enjoy things like the kick boxing and cock fighting.
Wilbur Smith
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.
Wilbur Smith
Image
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
Image
They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.
Wilbur Smith
Image
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
Image
You don't turn out as many books as I did then by sitting around, being cozy with the family.
Wilbur Smith
Image
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