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"As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective."
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Exlpore more Literature quotes
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
Explore more quotes by Sara Sheridan
"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."
"It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me."
"I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from."
"The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial."
"Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think."
"An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave."
"Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities."
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