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"One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real."
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"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
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Personal Development
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
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Personal Development
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."
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Personal Development
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
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Personal Development
"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."
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Personal Development
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
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Personal Development
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something - distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world - but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
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"It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes."
Discovery
"Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think."
Writing
"Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it."
Love
"They march into the future to the rhythm of the past."
Time
"You can't trust anyone you have to pay, and really, they can't trust you."
Trust
"An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave."
Mystery
"Once you're on the pleasure express, it's hard to get off and switch to another, slower service."
Psychology
"Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities."
Research
"Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation."
Legacy
"I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction."
Storytelling
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