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"That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do."
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"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent."
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Personal Development
"I believe that to be the world's greatest livingwriterthere must be somethingterribly wrong with you.I don't even want to be the world's greatestdead writer.just being dead would be fairenough."
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"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."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them."
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Personal Development
"I'd be somewhat of a lousy writer if I didn't know what to say."
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Personal Development
"Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite."
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"In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India."
Time
"The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing."
Darkness
"Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others."
Career
"I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost."
Experience
"Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise."
Luck
"As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are."
Family
"I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading."
People
"This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true."
People
"All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there."
Life
"I will say I am the sum of my books."
Books
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