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"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." (1980)"
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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."
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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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"We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?"
Ethics
"You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out onto the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life - strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science fiction movie..."
Science
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
Science
"Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out."
History
"I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students."
Science
"When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it."
Earth
"There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right: it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process."
Science
"We are all star stuff."
Science
"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."
Truth
"Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today."
Science
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