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"I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative."
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"Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal."

"You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world."

"As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience."

"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."

"Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them."

"I'd be somewhat of a lousy writer if I didn't know what to say."

"A true piece of writing sets you free."
Explore more quotes by Nicholas Mosley

"After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it."

"It connects with the theologians' point that you can say what God is not, but not (easily) what He is."

"If they tell the police, the police will find out she was driving, and her career will be put into hell."

"Not only the style, but the way in which you don't exactly know what on earth has happened or is happening till about page two hundred - then it all becomes apparent in a blinding flash."

"I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is."

"There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious."

"To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative."

"The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity."

"I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative."
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