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"Their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be."
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"If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I'm against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It may seem so easy to take it easy but, it is never so easy to take it easy."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The 'practical' man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only the material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Okay, this is the wisdom. First, time spent on reconnaissanse is never wasted. Second, almost anything can be improved with the addition of bacon. And finally, there is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along-and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy."
Author Name
Personal Development
"People, imperfect and corruptible are society's building blocks. Political theories evading this reality are a catastrophe in waiting."
Author Name
Personal Development
". . . nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are . . ."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."
Life
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
Work
"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
"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."
Experience
"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."
Brevity
"Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world."
Destruction
"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."
Environment
"It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."
Fate
"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."
Youth
"Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut."
Time
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