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"People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of."
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"Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
Author Name
Personal Development

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
Author Name
Personal Development

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari."
Author Name
Personal Development

"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Do you genuinely love people? Or at least make an effort to like them? Your first impressions will be made easier and more successful when you start with your heart."
Author Name
Personal Development

"People do not understand what a great revenue economy is."
Author Name
Personal Development

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything."
Fact

"I think really good books can be read by anybody."
Books

"I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it."
Day

"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters."
Conversation

"I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they're learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting."
Kids

"The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way."
Expectation

"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth."
Experience

"It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean."
Books

"I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea."
Idea

"People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of."
People
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