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"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."
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"And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it."
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Personal Development

"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
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Personal Development

"I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write."
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Personal Development

"After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy."
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Personal Development

"When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs."
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Personal Development

"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
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Personal Development

"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
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Personal Development

"A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly."
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Personal Development

"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!."
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Personal Development

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
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"Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words."
Life

"What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project."
Work

"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."
Writing

"I've always thought of myself as a reporter."
Thought

"When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else."
People

"Poetry is life distilled."
Life

"When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water."
Love

"A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers."
Education

"Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise."
Gold

"Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home."
Art
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