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"A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
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Personal Development
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
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Personal Development
"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."
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Personal Development
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
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Personal Development
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
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Personal Development
"Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life."
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Personal Development
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
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Personal Development
"I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years."
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Personal Development
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
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Personal Development
"If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher."
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Personal Development
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"I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid."
Nature
"I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about."
Nature
"If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to."
People
"When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again."
Criticism
"If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke."
Fun
"I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges."
Work
"If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life."
Life
"I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell."
Health
"You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth."
Thought
"I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long."
Sympathy
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