Top 60 Wilbur Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I know it’s politically incorrect but I enjoy things like the kick boxing and cock fighting.”

— Wilbur Smith

2. “History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.”

— Wilbur Smith

3. “It’s a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full.”

— Wilbur Smith

4. “Robin Hood was also a terrorist – but he had some style and a little class.”

— Wilbur Smith

5. “They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.”

— Wilbur Smith

6. “I have never had too much trouble for creative ideas to spring up in my mind.”

— Wilbur Smith

7. “Something always dies when the lion feeds – and yet there is meat for those that follow him.”

— Wilbur Smith

8. “Duplicity thy name is woman!”

— Wilbur Smith

9. “The branch breaks that will not bend with the wind. You must learn to bend”.”

— Wilbur Smith

10. “I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.”

— Wilbur Smith

11. “I go on a hunting safari at least once a year to Botswana, which is fantastic because we have a huge area of wilderness entirely to ourselves. My island covers roughly 55 acres, which again I have to myself, with nearly half a kilometre of private beach with my own jetties and boats.”

— Wilbur Smith

12. “When I vacate this sack of old bones I won’t care what you do with it. Bury or burn it but don’t make much fuss.”

— Wilbur Smith

13. “Sometimes it is best for men not to attempt to interfere with destiny. Our prayers can be answered in ways which we do not expect and do not welcome.”

— Wilbur Smith

14. “Fly for me, Bird of the Sun.”

— Wilbur Smith

15. “Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds.”

— Wilbur Smith

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Litigation only makes lawyers fat.”

— Wilbur Smith

20. “I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I’m a manipulator as well.”

— Wilbur Smith

21. “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

22. “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.”

— Wilbur Smith

23. “A man follows the path laid out for him. He does his duty to God and his King. He does what he must do, not what pleases him. God’s truth, boy, what kind of world would this be if every man did what pleased him alone? Who would plough the fields and reap the harvest, if every man had the right to say, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ In this world there is a place for every man, but every man must know his place.”

— Wilbur Smith

24. “Yet such is the perversity of human nature that I hungered for what I could never have and dreamed of the impossible.”

— Wilbur Smith

25. “Play the game without mercy, play to win.”

— Wilbur Smith

26. “If I have to die, then it’s best to do so before I see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed.”

— Wilbur Smith

27. “Cape Town’s beaches are superb and while the water on the Atlantic side is damn cold, it’s very pleasant on the other side. Bring your golf clubs if you play – Cape Town has some fabulous golf courses.”

— Wilbur Smith

28. “I love the sea as much as I love the veldt of Africa.”

— Wilbur Smith

29. “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

30. “When a traveller gets a thorn in his foot,’ Mbejane went on softly, ‘and he is wise he plucks it out – and he is a fool who leaves it and says “I will keep this thorn to prick me so that I will always remember the road upon which I have travelled.” Nkosi, it is better to remember with pleasure than with pain.”

— Wilbur Smith

31. “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

32. “Then she looked at his eyes and her panic smoothed away. With those eyes watching over her she was never to feel frightened again, not until the very end and that was a long time away. Going into his love was like going into a castle, a thick-walled place. A safe place where no one else could enter. The first feeling of it was so strong that she could only stand quietly and let the warmth wrap her.”

— Wilbur Smith

33. “The man who drinks Zambezi waters must always return to drink again.”

— Wilbur Smith

34. “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

35. “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.”

— Wilbur Smith

36. “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

37. “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

38. “The really disturbing thing about Somalia is that in a country where there are few economic opportunities, pirates are perceived as glamorous and are held in awe by young boys who aspire to their lifestyle.”

— Wilbur Smith

39. “It’s probably true that everyone has a book in them, although it may not be a very good one.”

— Wilbur Smith

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Wilbur Smith

42. “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

43. “There’s nothing so aphrodisiacal for a woman as money and success.”

— Wilbur Smith

44. “What I like about writing is the sense of godlike power it gives you.”

— Wilbur Smith

45. “I read all of Rider Haggard’s books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I’m delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that’s exactly what I am.”

— Wilbur Smith

Featured in: Romance Quotes

46. “I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.”

— Wilbur Smith

47. “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

48. “As they slithered up the muddy bank, scores of tiny silver fish that had been feasting on the open wounds were slow to relinquish their hold and were drawn out with the carcasses. Stranded upon the mud-banks, they flopped and quivered like stars that had fallen to earth.”

— Wilbur Smith

49. “We are all mere insects caught in the web that the gods spin for us.”

— Wilbur Smith

50. “Rage makes a man sick, my son. It spoils his appetite for life and keeps him from sleep at night. We cannot change our world, so we must look for the good things in life and enjoy those to the full.”

— Wilbur Smith