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""Therefore" is a word the poet must not know."
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"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years."

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

"I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing."

"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."

"Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions."

"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy."

"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."

"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."
Explore more quotes by Andre Gide

"What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told."

"Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again."

"It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves."

"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company."
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