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"I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue."
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"And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it."
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Personal Development
"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
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Personal Development
"I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write."
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Personal Development
"After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy."
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Personal Development
"When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs."
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Personal Development
"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
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Personal Development
"A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!."
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Personal Development
"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
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"I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious."
Movies
"Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature."
Movies
"I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer."
Being
"All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy."
Problems
"I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry."
Lifestyle
"It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied."
Movies
"Writers are not meant for action."
Action
"It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope."
Life
"What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?"
Dream
"Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing."
Movies
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