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"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay."
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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."
Learning
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"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."
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Personal Development
"And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs."
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Personal Development
"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."
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Personal Development
"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."
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Personal Development
"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."
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Personal Development
"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
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Personal Development
"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."
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Personal Development
"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."
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Personal Development
"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."
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Personal Development
"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."
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Personal Development
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