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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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Wilbur Smith
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: January 9
Mathematician
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Broken Hill
Wilbur Addison Smith
Books
Delighted
Read
Novelists
Haggard
Littles
Africa
Heir
Little
Romance
Rider
Book
Adventure
Heirs
Exactly
Riders
Looked
Novelist
Bits
Mysticism

More quotes by 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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I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind.
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'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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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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There's nothing so aphrodisiacal for a woman as money and success.
Wilbur Smith
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I put my soul into every book I write.
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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You don't turn out as many books as I did then by sitting around, being cozy with the family.
Wilbur Smith
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Authors can only soft sell the environment. Create a wonderful story around the environment involving the characters that leaves a lasting impression on the reader's mind.
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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beware of your most implacable enemy-yourself.
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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The best cure for racism is to have somebody shoot at you. Man, it does not matter then what color the arse is that comes to save yours-black or white, you're ready to give it a big fat kiss.
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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I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.
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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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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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