Maeve Binchy Quotes

I'd like to believe that I would be able to give in the same way Mandela did, but in reality, I don't know whether that is true. It is much more likely that I would be left with an immense sense of injustice and immense desire for revenge.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.

I do not believe in loving enemies; I have pretty hard work to love my friends. Neither do I believe in revenge. No man can afford to keep the viper of revenge in his heart. But I believe in justice, in self-defense.

I don't think vengeance is much good.

Oddly enough, I think that everybody can relate to revenge, on some level. Everyone has wanted to exact it, at some point, and everybody has tampered with the idea, even if they didn't actually go through with it.

I always told my young umpires, 'Don't get mad. Whatever you do, don't show it. But no matter how long it takes, get even.'

My own little rule was two for one. If one of my teammates got knocked down, then I knocked down two on the other team.

The thing with 'Mortal Kombat' is we really deal with that: What is the right thing to do? When somebody does something bad, do you, then, in your mind, rectify the situation by doing something bad to them?

As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.

Most action is based on redemption and revenge, and that's a formula. Moby Dick was formula. It's how you get to the conclusion that makes it interesting.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

The thirst for vengeance is a very real, even if a hideous, thing; and states may not ignore it till humanity has been raised to greater heights than any that have yet been scaled in all the long ages of struggle and ascent.

An eye for any eye makes the whole world blind.

Some day we may be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we will never forgive them for making us kill some of theirs.

I even opposed the death penalty for the man who killed my brother .

Justice is inextricably linked to revenge, which is both morally right and a deeply internalized instinct as innate to man as breathing, having sex, falling in love, and making war.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?

Blood must not have blood... I don't stand for anyone bullying bullies.

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

Too often, we think that, when we have a problem with our lives or our country, that the way to fix it is to take an eye for an eye. That doesn't help anything or anyone.

Whoever feels mercy for the cruel is bound to eventually be cruel to the merciful.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.