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"Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?"
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
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Personal Development

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

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

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

"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read."
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Personal Development

"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
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Personal Development

"One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters."
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Personal Development

"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
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Personal Development

"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
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"Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life."
Life


"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."
Time


"Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?"
Courage


"I like the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - like the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, waling the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was."
Solitude


"But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying "Apparently in answer to almost anything I said, making me feel stupid. "Um, I can't find the can opener. "Apparently. "There's going to be a lunar eclipse tonight. "Apparently. "Look, sparks are coming out of the wall socket. "Apparently."
Communication


"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."
Time


"Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist."
Criticism


"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
People


"It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens."
Work


"He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him - or what they thought was him - with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object."
Mourning
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