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"You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations."
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"I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more."
Work
"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first."
Poetry
"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
Writing
"I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it."
Family
"If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore."
Fiction
"In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts."
Truth
"If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having."
Experience
"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar."
Thought
"I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision."
Vision
"I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me."
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"I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise."
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Personal Development
"Expectation wasn't just about what people expected of you. It was about what you expected of yourself."
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Personal Development
"Expectations create and shape reality."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like ... When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I was so disappointed I cried. Of course, it was very lovely but it wasn't my idea of a diamond."
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Personal Development
"Some people won't go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter."
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Personal Development
"Whatever you search for will either meet you halfway or wait for you."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven."
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Personal Development
"When we set expectations and nourish them with appreciation, we will get better results."
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Personal Development
"I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life."
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Personal Development
"American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."
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Personal Development
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