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Quotes by Novelist
"Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people."
8
"The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume."
8
"To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating."
8
"A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty?"
8
"A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments."
8
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
8
"If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic."
8
"The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others."
8
"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
8
"Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality."
8
"A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind."
8
"Tim sends me a fairly ambitious workup in notebook form noting the passages we're going to cover and the chronology of the biblical events, and his commentaries on those things he's read and written."
8
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
8
"First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people."
8
"I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about."
8
"Admiration and familiarity are strangers."
8
"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
8
"Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel."
8
"When I write something, every word of it is meant. I can't say it enough."
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"It is such a secret place, the land of tears."
8
"The gratification of wealth is not found in mere possession or in lavish expenditure, but in its wise application."
8
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
8
"Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you."
8
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
8
"I've seen public opinion shift like the wind and put out the very fire it lighted."
8
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
8
"I attended the University of Louisville my freshman year, transferred to what was then Western Kentucky State Teachers College for my sophomore and junior years, and then graduated from the University of Louisville in the summer of 1961."
8
"There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, but there's no road leading from the ridiculous to the sublime."
8
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