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"I rather like getting away from fiction."
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"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
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Personal Development
"The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true."
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Personal Development
"Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story, to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all."
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Personal Development
"Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you."
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Personal Development
"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."
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Personal Development
"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."
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Personal Development
"You can't burn down a made-up place."
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Personal Development
"Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed)-Gandalf came by."
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Personal Development
"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."
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Personal Development
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
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"I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements."
Want
"There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history."
History
"I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are."
Change
"I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for."
Now
"It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency."
Choice
"I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction."
Fiction
"Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present."
History
"I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years."
Family
"I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past."
Past
"I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement."
History
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