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"If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'."
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"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
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Personal Development
"A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can."
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Personal Development
"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."
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Personal Development
"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."
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Personal Development
"Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea."
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Personal Development
"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."
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Personal Development
"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."
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Personal Development
"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
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Personal Development
"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
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Personal Development
"You never know what you will write until you write it."
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"But all attractions are alike,' he said. 'They come from an emptiness inside.' He hammered on this chest with his index finger. 'Something's missing and you have to fill it. Books, paintings, people, they're all the same...''A lot of people do without books and paintings.''True,' he said, 'but that doesn't affect the argument.' Paris turned his head to one side and chewed on his lip. 'Of course, nothing ever does the trick. Nobody's really satisfied for long."
Desire
"What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible."
Memory
"We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots."
Literature
"Fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning."
Imagination
"We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind."
Perception
"Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption."
Psychology
"Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened."
Nostalgia
"In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath."
Survival
"It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant."
Empathy
"Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on."
Imagination
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