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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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"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."

"Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend."

"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."

"Imminent GM bankruptcy was always fiction, created by Wall Street and the media."

"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."

"A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves."

"In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds."

"Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world. Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster."

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
Explore more quotes by Harold Brodkey


"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."


"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."


"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."


"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."


"I can't change the past, and I don't think I would. I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it."


"I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness."


"I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not."


"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."


"I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense."
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