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"But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance."
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"Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure."

"What a man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm."

"Everything interested him and everything excited him."

"And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do."

"I've been amazed at the degree to which Democrats, in particular, have expressed their enthusiasm for the president's manner with which he handled this budget."

"Its appearance was greeted with cries of rapture, and following a brief struggle over possesion of the volume, William rescued it before it should be torn to pieces, but allowed himself to be induced to read some of the passages aloud, his dramatic rendering being greeted by wolflike howls of enthusiasim and hails of live pits."

"Enthusiasm for a cause sometimes warps judgment."

"There is a real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment."

"Being accused of enthusiasm is something I'll never live down."

"You can't climb up to the second floor without a ladder. When you set your aim too high and don't fulfill it, then your enthusiasm turns to bitterness. Try for a goal that's reasonable, and then gradually raise it."
Explore more quotes by Norton Juster

"One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything."

"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."
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