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"Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience."
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"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."
Author Name
Personal Development
"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
Author Name
Personal Development
"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Elders in the dark see better than children in the light."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers."
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Personal Development
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"If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas."
Ideas
"Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer."
Books
"I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time."
Time
"It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering."
Awareness
"I held a variety of jobs - most notably ten years working in universities - and kept on writing."
Job
"What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him."
Character
"Being comfortable isn't the way to learn to expand your abilities."
Being
"I don't consciously do anything to maintain a unique voice."
Voice
"I don't think the problem is that people don't read enough mystery books, but that people don't read."
People
"If you'll think about various series you've read, can you think of any instance in which, say, the tenth volume of the series is notably better than the first nine? I can't."
First
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