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"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
Author Name
Personal Development
"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You never know what you will write until you write it."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Knowing what o'clock it is gives ye the illusion that ye have some control over your circumstances."
Time
"After all, I thought, what were days and weeks in the presence of eternity?"
Time
"When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up."
Ambition
"True, the body's easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled - yet there's that in a man that is never destroyed."
Philosophy
"Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth."
Career
"Roger speaking to Brianna: It's too important. You don't forget having a dad."You do remember your father?"No. I remember yours."
Parenting
"Its appearance was greeted with cries of rapture, and following a brief struggle over possesion of the volume, William rescued it before it should be torn to pieces, but allowed himself to be induced to read some of the passages aloud, his dramatic rendering being greeted by wolflike howls of enthusiasim and hails of live pits."
Enthusiasm
"For a different woman, a different relationship, a different situation, gentleness might have been the proper, the only approach-but not for this woman, in these circumstances. The only thing that will cleanse Claire (and reassure her: look at what she says at the end of it. She feels safe again, having felt the power and violence in him) is violence. And-the most important point here-Jamie pays attention to what she wants, rather than proceeding with his own notion of how it should be, even though it's a sensible notion and the one most people would have."
Relationship
"It's the anonymity of the war that makes the killing possible. When the nameless dead are named again on tombstone and on cenotaph, then they regain the identity they lost as soldiers, and take their place in grief and memory, the ghosts of sons and lovers."
History
"What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that is the ability to distinguish patterns out of chaos."
Knowledge
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