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"When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask."
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"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."
"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
Explore more quotes by C. S. Forester
"When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask."
"They managed to find time... to tell me that there was no chance of my being accepted for service and that really I should be surprised to still be alive."
"A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts."
"I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this."
"The fools ran after me and I ran after the whores, foolish though I realized such a proceeding to be."
"Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out."
"A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted."
"I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers."
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