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"The prose, Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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Personal Development
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
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Personal Development
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
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Personal Development
"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
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Personal Development
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
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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
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
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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 atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
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"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."
Power
"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
Observation
"Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do."
Perception
"Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel."
Fiction
"No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog."
Humor
"The prose, Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style."
Literature
"This is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash."
Mortality
"If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels."
Status
"The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey."
Optimism
"He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself."
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