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"I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately."
Reading
"To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation."
History
"Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear."
Poetry
"Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children."
Family
"The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it."
Language
"As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates."
Time
"I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all."
Fact
"However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned."
Writing
"I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place."
Age
"I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing."
Influence
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"Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration."
Author Name
Personal Development
"No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Genius: the superhuman in man."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Men exist for the sake of one another."
Author Name
Personal Development
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