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"Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
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"No writer can be the 'Master of the Words' without loving them! Loving is the way for Mastering! No Love, no Master!"

"You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story."

"I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job."

"I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it."

"Creativity is like the ocean: sometimes it is an unstoppable wave bursting forth, crashing onto the shore, and overwhelmingly flowing with no hope of restraint; other times it is completely still, lingering aimlessly and endlessly, seemingly devoid of any inspiration."

"A good imitation is the most perfect originality."

"I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im."

"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."

"These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world."
Explore more quotes by Lionel Trilling


"The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive."


"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect."


"The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather."


"Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony."


"This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking."


"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."


"Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere."


"Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process."
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