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"There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust."
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"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Writing is my pleasure and the play,where I find myself again and again."
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Personal Development
"Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself."
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Personal Development
"There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale."
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Personal Development
"My writings are my letters to the universe, who loved me like a mother."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Writing is a disease of the mind, which is expressed through a pen."
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Personal Development
"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
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Personal Development
"What makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth..."
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Personal Development
"The eloquence of the pen is just as sharp as the point of a sword."
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Personal Development
"A writer illuminates the lights of her heart so that everyone can see themselves in the mirror of her thoughts."
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Personal Development
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"Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy."
Writing
"Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages-he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be."
Lifestyle
"There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already."
Life
"Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There'll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It's a reversion to constant, visceral fear."
Morality
"I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand."
Emotion
"Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes."
Truth
"While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew."
Wisdom
"I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself."
Self
"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."
Regret
"Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no."
Wisdom
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