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"I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it - well, it is dangerous - but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work."
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"If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union."

"The purpose of work is to labor and invest time in your gift."

"The people who have recently come to this country to work and better their lives should be given the same opportunities that our parents, grandparents, and ancestors were given."

"Bolts work on nuts; pens work on paper. But you must work on yourself. Go, get working!"
Explore more quotes by Harold Brodkey


"I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing."


"I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred."


"If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination."


"I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off."


"I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness."


"I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense."


"True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale."


"It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years."


"It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do."
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