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"It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture."
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"The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."
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Personal Development
"Retro is a symptom of a generation that is too lazy to innovate."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years."
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Personal Development
"Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hungry for more food, status, or money, yet really we are hungry for connection."
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Personal Development
"The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all."
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Personal Development
"America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death."
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Personal Development
"To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul."
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Personal Development
"I see Lord Buddha in the 21st Century across national borders, across faith systems, across political ideologies, playing the role of a bridge to promote understanding to counsel patience and to enlighten us with tolerance and empathy."
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Personal Development
"What is honored in a culture gets cultivated there."
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Personal Development
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"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."
Creativity
"When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."
Literature
"That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease."
Perception
"I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence."
Work
"It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is-an intense form of thought."
Creativity
"Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail."
Society
"When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."
Mortality
"Hardship makes the world obscure."
Hardship
"How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature."
Literature
"I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts."
Communication
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