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"When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately."
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"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
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"The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true."
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"Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story, to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all."
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"Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you."
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"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."
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"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."
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"You can't burn down a made-up place."
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"Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed)-Gandalf came by."
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"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."
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"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
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"When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship."
People

"My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano."
Family

"I do not feel an exile from America in any sense."
Patriotism

"When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately."
Fiction

"I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then."
Life

"My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead."
Family

"I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing."
Life

"It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth."
Ambiguity

"In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old."
People

"I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English."
Career
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