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"I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time."
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"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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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Personal Development
"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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Personal Development
"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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Personal Development
"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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Personal Development
"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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Personal Development
"You can't burn down a made-up place."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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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"There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite."
Friendship
"If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom."
Boredom
"An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm."
Routine
"These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off."
Time
"Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary."
Fear
"Each new book is a tremendous challenge."
Challenge
"I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old."
Death
"Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question."
Authority
"As soon as I started writing Julia, by which I mean while writing its first sentence, I felt a sudden, reassuring charge of excitement. I knew it was going to work."
Work
"I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear."
Fear
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