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"Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
Author Name
Personal Development

"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
Author Name
Personal Development

"She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?"
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

"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
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Personal Development
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"When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten."
Family

"Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things."
Literature

"I love devils."
Love

"Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all."
Truth

"The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary."
Life

"There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong."
Risk

"I do not see any beauty in self-restraint."
Beauty

"I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book."
Reading

"I've never made plans for more than a day ahead."
Opportunity

"I have never read a line of Walt Whitman."
Reading
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