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"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."
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"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."
Learning
"If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival."
Routine
"When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist."
Creativity
"When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle."
Philosophy
"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
Communication
"I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened."
Life
"Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited."
Ethics
"Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them."
Opinion
"If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."
Philosophy
"Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me."
Learning
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"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."
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Personal Development
"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."
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Personal Development
"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."
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Personal Development
"Make movies my friend " make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul."
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Personal Development
"Music is breath of life."
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Personal Development
"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."
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Personal Development
"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."
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Personal Development
"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."
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Personal Development
"Music gives life to the soul."
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Personal Development
"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."
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Personal Development
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