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"The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented."
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"Let's pursue the visage of imagination."
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Personal Development
"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."
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Personal Development
"The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!"
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Personal Development
"For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse."
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Personal Development
"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
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Personal Development
"A writer cannot serve today those who make history, he must serve those who are subject to it."
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Personal Development
"I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it."
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Personal Development
"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."
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Personal Development
"My dear Copperfield, he replied. "To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail which they involve. Even in our professional correspondence, said Mr. Micawber, glancing at some letters he was writing, "the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression. Still, it is a great pursuit! A great pursuit!"
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Personal Development
"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal that you can gather votes like box tops is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
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"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness."
Happiness
"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
Compassion
"The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything."
History
"He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist."
Mortality
"He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him."
Anger
"Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
Purpose
"In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted."
Philosophy
"Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought."
Thought
"For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That - that is the raison d'Aatre of the art of the novel."
Philosophy
"The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish."
Time
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