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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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"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
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Personal Development
"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
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Personal Development
"A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can."
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Personal Development
"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."
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Personal Development
"The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
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"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."
Exploration
"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."
Exploration
"I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table."
Habit
"In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature."
Life
"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."
Nation
"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."
Faith
"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."
Success
"I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels."
Writing
"My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage."
Marriage
"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."
Life
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