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"I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize."
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"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story, to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all."
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Personal Development

"Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you."
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Personal Development

"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."
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Personal Development

"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."
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Personal Development

"You can't burn down a made-up place."
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Personal Development

"Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed)-Gandalf came by."
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Personal Development

"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."
Author Name
Personal Development

"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
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"It's totally mistaken to suppose that an armed escort is going to give a journalist any protection - on the contrary, journalists who turn up surrounded by armed personnel are just turning themselves into targets and in even worse danger."
Danger

"I was sent to a nice Church of England girls' school and at that time, after university, a woman was expected to become a teacher, a nurse or a missionary - prior to marriage."
Marriage

"It wasn't glamorous in my day. In the regions, reporters were seen as such low life that they didn't merit their name in the Radio Times. Now people are interested in being famous. I never gave it a thought."
Life

"On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information."
Information

"I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize."
Fiction

"I don't want to be involved in endless media gossip."
Privacy

"I've never been one to sit around and eat my heart out. Life's too short."
Life

"Beslan, where the Russian authorities stopped live coverage of the school being stormed, was an illustration of the progress we still have to make."
Progress

"I have nothing to do with the selection of stories. I'm the reporter."
Nothing

"I have never been attracted to any kind of violence."
Pacifism
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