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"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
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"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
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Personal Development
"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."
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Personal Development
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."
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Personal Development
"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."
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Personal Development
"If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude."
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Personal Development
"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."
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Personal Development
"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
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Personal Development
"Her words dance on the page."
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Personal Development
"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."
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Personal Development
"You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't."
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"Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true."
Life
"But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there."
Freedom
"...many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu."
Memory
"Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew-that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds."
War
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
Literature
"Her face looked for the answer that is always concealed in language."
Communication
"I always found in myself a dread of west and love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that the birth and death of the day had some part in my feeling about the two ranges of mountains."
Nature
"Seems to me you put too much stock in the affairs of children. It probably didn't mean anything." "Yes, it meant something. Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?"
Life
"Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an' not to no murder. You done right. Don't you kill nobody if you can help it."
Emotion
"The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty."
Discipline
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