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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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Wilbur Smith
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: January 9
Mathematician
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Broken Hill
Wilbur Addison Smith
Crowds
Failure
Success
Sweeter
Makes
Thumb
Much
Thumbs
Nose
Noses
Allows

More quotes by Wilbur Smith

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I love the sea as much as I love the veldt of Africa.
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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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
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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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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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What I like about writing is the sense of godlike power it gives you.
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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I put my soul into every book I write.
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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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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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 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 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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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
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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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My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench.
Wilbur Smith
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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
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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 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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Usually halfway through a book I have a serious depression, so I go on safari on my ranch in South Africa, or fishing off my island in the Seychelles. When I come back and re-read it, I think: 'What was all that about, Smith? It's fine, just get on with it.'
Wilbur Smith