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"Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible."
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"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."
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Personal Development
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
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"Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must."
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Personal Development
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
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Personal Development
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
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Personal Development
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
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Personal Development
"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."
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Personal Development
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
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Personal Development
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
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Personal Development
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
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"The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along."
Existence
"I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis."
Literature
"Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel."
Books
"Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present."
Literature
"It's funny to be a critic."
Fun
"The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading."
Reading
"I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley."
Work
"It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end."
Literature
"DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath."
Nothing
"Writers always know whether you like them or not."
Media
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