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"As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?"
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"Politicians look for interests not people."
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Personal Development
"When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force."
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Personal Development
"Experience is in the fingers and the head. The heart is inexperienced."
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Personal Development
"And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet."
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Personal Development
"I believe the term is 'eminent domain.'Ah, yes. That means 'theft by the government."
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Personal Development
"There is no single truth in a world ruled by many political parties."
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Personal Development
"Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties."
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Personal Development
"Democracy is good, but it is not good for an uneducated dogmatic society. Often, that society does not know how to choose wisely."
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Personal Development
"If you have to say or do something controversial, aim so that people will hate that they love it and not love that they hate it."
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Personal Development
"Majority wins, but majority is not necessarily right and sometimes majority is awfully wrong."
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Personal Development
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"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me."
Books
"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."
Writing
"You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it."
Writing
"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."
Books
"Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are."
Writer
"I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood."
People
"Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem."
Talent
"It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely."
Life
"I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it."
Johnson
"I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing."
Creativity
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