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"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
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"And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it."
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Personal Development
"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
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Personal Development
"I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write."
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Personal Development
"After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy."
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Personal Development
"When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did do - well that's memoirs."
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Personal Development
"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!."
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Personal Development
"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."
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Personal Development
"We do not write because we want to, we write because we have to."
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"A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health."
Society
"What is my definition of jazz? 'Safe sex of the highest order."
Music
"When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moment, past, present, future, always have existed, always will exist."
Death
"What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain."
Relationship
"There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes."
Observation
"What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."
War
"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?''Yes' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."
Existence
"It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That's all I can say."
Morality
"Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside. "I fry mine in butter!" indeed."
Life
"Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia."
Society
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