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"Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded."
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"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home."
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Personal Development
"A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated-as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man."
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"The crown of literature is poetry."
Poetry
"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."
Life
"It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it."
People
"A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing."
Home
"We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits."
Friendship
"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."
Character
"I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."
Life
"It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent."
Work
"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."
Happiness
"In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally."
Woman
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