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"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."

"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy."

"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."

"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."

"I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."

"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."

"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
Explore more quotes by James Welch

"The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."

"Before, Indian people had been so defeated, they were always looking for outsiders, for the government, to somehow come in and fix things. But now, they seem to realize that they're the only ones who can save themselves."

"Nobody would take checks from Indians, nobody would give them any credit, and nobody would let them drink in the bars. There was a rudeness, a brusqueness, with which the Indians were treated constantly. At a very young age, that had entered my consciousness."

"Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana."
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