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"On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk."
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"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What you are seeking is yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The world is full of vanities."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries."
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Personal Development
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"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."
Creativity
"It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me."
Growth
"I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from."
Reflection
"The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial."
Politics
"Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble."
Knowledge
"A chap's impending death has a way of focusing the mind."
Mortality
"I didn't want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank."
Work
"Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist."
Writing
"For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it."
Writing
"It's ridiculous " a girl steps out, goes dancing, gets her hair cut, decides to spend the summer in Italy and it's a scandal. A chap does it and no one bats an eyelid."
Gender
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