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"If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that."
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"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?"
Writing

"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
Memory

"Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends."
Wisdom

"There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine."
Emotion

"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art."
Education

"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
Philosophy

"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
Life

"When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again."
Life

"You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"
Reflection

"I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments."
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"The future is created by those who have a great imagination and the will to make it a reality by their actions."
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Personal Development

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer."
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Personal Development

"If I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it."
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Personal Development

"Skill gives you legs to jog, talent gives you legs to run, brilliance gives you legs to sprint, but genius gives you wings to fly."
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Personal Development

"For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator."
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Personal Development

"Now go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here."
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Personal Development

"Imagination is a glorious wonder."
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Personal Development

"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."
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Personal Development

"Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic."
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Personal Development

"Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did - but they only thought of it."
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Personal Development
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