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"We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That's the only disadvantage."
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"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Books are humanity in print."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names."
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Personal Development
"Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something."
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Personal Development
"Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind."
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Personal Development
"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
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Personal Development
"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me."
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"We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That's the only disadvantage."
Books
"The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work."
Work
"Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials."
Being
"In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn."
Politics
"I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world."
Opportunity
"If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside."
Writing
"Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates."
Time
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