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"In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc."
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"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."
Author Name
Personal Development

"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
Author Name
Personal Development

"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Elders in the dark see better than children in the light."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers."
Author Name
Personal Development

"There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected."
Life

"Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard."
Success

"As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together."
Identity

"Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization."
Art

"Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great."
People

"If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire."
Writing

"I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit."
Creativity

"I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique."
Honesty

"The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors."
Writing

"In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc."
Experience
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