Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Piers Paul Read

British Novelist and Non-Fiction Writer, Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Geoffrey Faber, Somerset Maugham and James Tait Black Awards

"Sins become more subtle as you grow older; you commit sins of despair rather than lust."

"Truth is always duller than fiction."

"Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites."

"I have been charged by strict Catholics with offending the modesty of the reader in passages in some of my novels, and defend myself with Cardinal Newman's axiom that "one cannot have a sinless literature of sinful man"."

"As I grew older I like to think I grew wiser and came to see how 'social' Catholicism, however superficially appealing in the face of the suffering caused by poverty and injustice, in fact falsifies the teaching of the Gospels."

"Are you cowards or what?"

"It was as if the torrid vastness of Brazil to the north and the muddy waters of the River Plate to the south and west acted not only as natural barriers but as a protective shell in a cocoon of time."

"I want them to read 'Forty-five Uruguayans cross the cordillera at all costs.'"

"The Cross had been replaced in the teaching of the Liberationists priests by the AK-47 assault rifle, and those Catholics who dissented from their point of view risked their lives."

"Nothing broke the monotonous ascent of these brittle mountains except snow."

"Out into the icy air fell the steward, the navigator, and their pack of cards, followed by three of the boys still trapped to their seats."

"The novelist suggests paradoxes and ambiguities. Only God sees into our souls."

"The interests they had in common, besides rugby and business, were cars and girls, and it was this which had gained them the reputation of playboys."