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"It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one's judgement."
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"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."
Author Name
Personal Development

"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."
Author Name
Personal Development

"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
Author Name
Personal Development

"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Elders in the dark see better than children in the light."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Beyond these moments, she could hardly count the fumbling ministrations of boys in high school who, even to her senior prom, never went beyond sticky pleasantries. With one exception, it was just a sort of half-clothed handshake for bragging rights, none hers."
Author Name
Personal Development
More

"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."
Creativity

"It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me."
Growth

"I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from."
Reflection

"The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial."
Politics

"Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble."
Knowledge

"A chap's impending death has a way of focusing the mind."
Mortality

"Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think."
Writing

"I didn't want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank."
Work

"Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist."
Writing

"I find it inspiring to actively choose which traditions to celebrate and also come up with new ideas for traditions of my own."
Culture
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