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"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth."
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"I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea."
Idea

"A good book written for children can be read by adults."
Children

"The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way."
Expectation

"There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction."
Books

"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth."
Experience

"But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance."
Enthusiasm

"I think really good books can be read by anybody."
Books

"I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they're learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting."
Kids

"People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of."
People

"It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean."
Books
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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

"And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs."
Author Name
Personal Development

"But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting."
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

"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."
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
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