I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind.
I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.
I shot my first lion at the age of 14 when a pride threatened my father’s livestock while he was away on holiday.
I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I’m a manipulator as well.
I put my soul into every book I write.
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.
Litigation only makes lawyers fat.
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.
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.
History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.
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.’
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.
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.
It’s probably true that everyone has a book in them, although it may not be a very good one.
What I like about writing is the sense of godlike power it gives you.
You don’t turn out as many books as I did then by sitting around, being cozy with the family.
At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham’s ‘Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.’ To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester’s works and the little urn that contains my mother’s ashes.
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.
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.
My family wasn’t terribly affluent and looked upon money very carefully as something that had to be saved, not spent. My father built the ducting that took air into the copper mines and made about 6 d a yard in the Thirties, which was good money back then.