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"I've only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel."
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"Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?"

"Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction: Simply to participate."

"Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first."

"The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses."

"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

"Create with the heart, build with the mind."
Explore more quotes by Roman Payne

"Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came."

"As a very young man, I thought of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen."

"Those things: Mystery, Fate, and Enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we're not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world the young preside over."

"Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature."

"If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination."

"Did I live the spring I'd sought?It's true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day to slumber at my feet.Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song,like morning birds they pass along,o'er crests of trees, to none belong;o'er crests of trees of drying dew,their larking flight, my hands, eschewThus I'll say it once and true.From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered."

"The birthing wolf,Her heart fed with tenderness,Gave forth from ripe brown nipples,Food to feed the universe."

"I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side."

"When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she'd gone and I'd felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving."

"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
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