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"It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have."
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"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."
Learning
"If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival."
Routine
"When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist."
Creativity
"When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle."
Philosophy
"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
Communication
"I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened."
Life
"Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited."
Ethics
"Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them."
Opinion
"If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."
Philosophy
"Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me."
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"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
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Personal Development
"If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs."
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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
"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."
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Personal Development
"But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality."
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Personal Development
"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.."
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Personal Development
"You're much shorter than my mom.""Brat," she said, surprised into a giggle."That's no way to talk to a vampire.""Bloodsucking brat.""Better" he said."
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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
"The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song."
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Personal Development
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