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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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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
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Personal Development
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
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Personal Development
"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."
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Personal Development
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
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Personal Development
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
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Personal Development
"Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life."
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Personal Development
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
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Personal Development
"I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher."
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Personal Development
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"Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know."
Work
"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."
Home
"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."
Time
"The work is with me when I wake up in the morning; it is with me while I eat my breakfast in bed and run through the newspaper, while I shave and bathe and dress."
Work
"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."
Books
"The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day."
Writing
"Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor."
Writing
"The fools ran after me and I ran after the whores, foolish though I realized such a proceeding to be."
Fool
"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."
Desire
"Novel writing wrecks homes."
Writing
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