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"Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds."
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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 Nathalie Sarraute
"The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me."
"It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles."
"I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well."
"Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium."
"The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading."
"It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others."
"One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read."
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