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"I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels."
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"Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal."
"You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world."
"As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience."
"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."
"I'd be somewhat of a lousy writer if I didn't know what to say."
"A true piece of writing sets you free."
"A writer travels through the heart again and again to express the beauty of its contents."
"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine."
Explore more quotes by Patrick White
"As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains."
"I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table."
"In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school."
"In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature."
"I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on."
"I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood."
"Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man."
"My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage."
"Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved."
"Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays."
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