Top 300 Ken Follett Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Philip had always believed that hard work should be rewarded by good food.”

— Ken Follett

152. “Philip believed that caring for people was the service of God. That was what salvation was about.”

— Ken Follett

153. “He wondered if he really was capable of it. Then he thought what a thrill it would be to create something from nothing; to see, one day in the future, a new church here where now there was nothing but rubble, and to say: I made this.”

— Ken Follett

154. “Fitz probably had half a dozen bastards around the world, but Ethel’s was the only one he knew of for sure.”

— Ken Follett

155. “Welsh chapelgoers automatically sang in four-part harmony, and when they were in the mood they could raise the roof. As he joined in, Lloyd felt this was the beating heart of Britain, here in this whitewashed chapel.”

— Ken Follett

156. “Puedo hacer frente a cualquier cosa siempre que te tenga a mi lado.”

— Ken Follett

157. “If I’ve learned one thing in Spain, it’s that we have to fight the Communists just as hard as the Fascists. They’re both evil.”

— Ken Follett

158. “Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced.”

— Ken Follett

159. “A child will always be what he is, she thought, and not what you want him to be.”

— Ken Follett

160. “But now he realized that, as a Jew, you could go anywhere in the world and always find someone to treat you like family.”

— Ken Follett

161. “The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt.”

— Ken Follett

162. “People think they’re being saved from a Bolshevik revolution,” Frunze said. “The Nazi press has them convinced that the Communists were about to launch a campaign of murder, arson, and poison in every town and village.”

— Ken Follett

163. “For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.”

— Ken Follett

164. “Fitz must not know in advance, for he would try to stop her. He might simply lock her in her room. He could even get her committed to a lunatic asylum. A wealthy upper-class man could have a female relative put away without much difficulty. All Fitz would have to do was to find two doctors willing to agree with him that she must be mad to want to marry a German.”

— Ken Follett

165. “With the fascination of a condemned man watching the carpenter build the gallows.”

— Ken Follett

166. “I started writing stories in my spare time.”

— Ken Follett

167. “Chaperoning rules had relaxed since the outbreak of war. It was no longer scandalous for a single woman to go out unescorted in the daytime.”

— Ken Follett

168. “He was nineteen years old, homeless and rootless, with no family and no purpose in life.”

— Ken Follett

169. “A German attack on Russia’s ally France would, in reality, be defensive – but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.”

— Ken Follett

170. “Until August the Luftwaffe had raided only ports and airfields. Fitz had explained, in an unusually candid moment, that the British were not so scrupulous: the government had approved bombing of targets in German cities back in May, and all through June and July the RAF had dropped bombs on women and children in their homes. The German public had been enraged by this and demanded retaliation. The Blitz was the result.”

— Ken Follett

171. “If you don’t take an interest, then what happens is your fault.”

— Ken Follett

172. “Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.”

— Ken Follett

173. “Don’t worry. We who are born poor have to use cunning to get what we want. Scruples are for the privileged.” She.”

— Ken Follett

174. “Are you dating anyone?’ ‘Sally Dasilva.’ ‘The actress. I saw a picture of the two of you, arriving at some premiere, but I didn’t know if it was serious.’ It was not very serious. ‘She’s in LA, and we both work a lot. But we get a weekend together once in a while.’ ‘By the.”

— Ken Follett

175. “There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.”

— Ken Follett

176. “If earls’ daughters were allowed to marry whom they please, we’d all be ruled by strolling minstrels and dark-eyed outlaws.”

— Ken Follett

177. “Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me. Why? Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved.”

— Ken Follett

178. “There is a real connection between Philosopy and fiction.”

— Ken Follett

179. “You mean there isn’t an indisputable book that is the actual Word of God? Men argue about it and make a judgment?”

— Ken Follett

180. “A man hates the person he has wronged, paradoxically. I think it’s because the victim is a perpetual reminder that he behaved shamefully.”

— Ken Follett

181. “Any man who needs to surround himself with loyal acolytes doesn’t really believe in himself,” he would say. “And if he doesn’t believe in himself, why should I?”

— Ken Follett

182. “They learned that Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and it came as a shock if they ever found out that Protestants did the same to Catholics whenever they got the chance.”

— Ken Follett

183. “She was wilful, maddening, quarrelsome and intolerant, but somehow these things were trifling: there was a passion inside her that burned like a candle in a lantern, and it lit up his life.”

— Ken Follett

184. “And that was the problem, George reflected bitterly. People hated disorder. Press coverage had blamed the Riders for stirring up trouble, not the segregationists with their baseball bats and their bombs. It drove him mad with frustration: did no one in America think about what was right?”

— Ken Follett

185. “There was much talk about why the prime minister had brought back such a troublesome and unpredictable colleague, and the consensus was that he preferred to have Churchill inside the tent spitting out.”

— Ken Follett

186. “Aliena’s brother, Richard, sometimes reminded her of her father, with a look or a gesture, and that was when she felt a surge of affection.”

— Ken Follett

187. “There were more police than Fascists. From inside one of the buses, a uniformed constable gave him the Hitler salute. Lloyd was dismayed. If all these policemen sided with the Fascists, how could the counterdemonstrators resist them?”

— Ken Follett

188. “No, thank you, it’s nothing serious.” A headache that was not serious was the usual euphemism for a menstrual period, and everyone accepted this without further comment.”

— Ken Follett

189. “It did not occur to them that a woman could be dangerous. How foolish they were.”

— Ken Follett

190. “But when you grab happiness you may let go of something more valuable – your integrity. – Hugh Pilaster.”

— Ken Follett

191. “For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.”

— Ken Follett

192. “He put on his coat and hat. Then he returned to the kitchen. He kissed his mother and embraced his father. “What’s this for?” said his father. “You’re only going to work.” “It’s just in case we never meet again,” Volodya said. Then he went out.”

— Ken Follett

193. “They had just started their first scheduled air service. Planes went from Vienna to Kiev and back like railway trains. There would be a network of flights all over Europe after Germany won the war. And Walter and Maud would raise their children in a peaceful and well-ordered world.”

— Ken Follett

194. “What about America? They believe in democracy. Surely they’ll sell guns to Spain?” “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But there’s a well-financed Catholic lobby, led by a millionaire called Joseph Kennedy, opposing any help to the Spanish government. And a Democratic president needs Catholic support. Roosevelt won’t do anything to jeopardize his New Deal.”

— Ken Follett

195. “Her well-being was more important to me than my own. I have learned, during the course of a long life, that that is the meaning of love.”

— Ken Follett

196. “She now welcomed him to her bedroom, dressed in pretty nightwear, offering him her scented body as she had when they were first married. In the end she was a well-brought-up aristocratic woman and she knew what a wife was for.”

— Ken Follett

197. “A very good editor is almost a collaborator.”

— Ken Follett

198. “Los manifestantes pueden causar un gran impacto, pero al final son los gobiernos los que remodelan el mundo.”

— Ken Follett

199. “Sir Edward Grey was a thin man with a face like a skull. He disliked foreigners and almost never traveled abroad: in British eyes, that made him the perfect foreign secretary. “Thank.”

— Ken Follett

200. “After a certain point, most people, including editors, will tell you everything you do is great.”

— Ken Follett