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"I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out."
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"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
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Personal Development
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
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Personal Development
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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Personal Development
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
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Personal Development
"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
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Personal Development
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
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Personal Development
"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."
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Personal Development
"In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home."
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Personal Development
"A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated-as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man."
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Personal Development
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"Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life."
Life
"My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert."
Family
"I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out."
Literature
"I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order."
Faith
"So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions."
Fun
"I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do."
Time
"When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring."
Control
"I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before."
Character
"Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that."
Life
"Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like."
Work
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