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"If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination."
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Exlpore more Fiction quotes
"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."
"Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death."
"Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message."
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
"Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away."
"Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to 'cleaning' as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings " and anyway, she didn't need to know her mark's entire pedigree or life's story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read " on those rare occasions " her books were always dog-eared from the back."
Explore more quotes by Harold Brodkey
"Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself."
"Me, my literary reputation is mostly abroad, but I am anchored here in New York. I can't think of any other place I'd rather die than here."
"I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it - well, it is dangerous - but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work."
"I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off."
"It is death that goes down to the center of the earth, the great burial church the earth is, and then to the curved ends of the universe, as light is said to do."
"It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years."
"True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale."
"God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle - or instruction."
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