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"I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler."
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"The bowl is warmer than the soup."
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Personal Development
"No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer."
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Personal Development
"Good God. Men everywhere."
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Personal Development
"As far as she could see, children mostly argued, shouted, ran around very fast, laughed loudly, picked their noses, got dirty and sulked."
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Personal Development
"He reads much;He is a great observer and he looksQuite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays,As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sortAs if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spiritThat could be moved to smile at any thing.Such men as he be never at heart's easeWhiles they behold a greater than themselves,And therefore are they very dangerous."
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Personal Development
"Society in its boundless ignorance ridicules the caterpillar but praises the butterfly."
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Personal Development
"Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business."
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Personal Development
"Take a perfect day add six hours of rain and fog and you have instant London."
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Personal Development
"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish."
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Personal Development
"When you see a married couple coming down the street the one who is two or three steps ahead is the one who's mad."
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Personal Development
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"One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely."
Resilience
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
Philosophy
"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."
Art
"May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby."
Life
"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
Art
"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
Perception
"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
Society
"Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something."
Music
"The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can."
Success
"If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself."
Philosophy
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