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Quotes by Novelist
"Most men remember obligations, but are not often likely to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent."
35
"Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."
35
"I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy."
35
"First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people."
35
"Cooking wasn't so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn't seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it."
35
"In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea."
35
"Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you."
35
"I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first."
35
"My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination."
35
"Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?"
35
"Yeah, that's exactly how I feel when I'm around you: confused, but still satisfied.' I freeze, trying to figure out how to cancel it out and replace it with something that sounds a whole lot less like sex and a candy bar ad."
35
"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune."
35
"The Mole had long wanted to make the I acquaintance of the Badger. He seemed, by all accounts, to be such an important personage and, though rarely visible, to make his unseen influence felt by everybody about the place."
35
"Though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark."
35
"Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable."
35
"I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober."
35
"There were rules among friends, commandments, really, and the most important one was Thou Shalt Not Lust After Thy Friend's Sister."
35
"She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand."
35
"Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.)"
35
"There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs."
35
"Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength."
35
"There are two types of people in the world, and I'm one of them."
35
"There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency-which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours-to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm."
35
"The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be misunderstood by a world that values all the wrong things."
35
"I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it."
35
"I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress."
35
"You have pissed your last in this house . . . and I don't make velvet roses anymore."
35
"Popular! In America, what else matters?"
35
"Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink, that will cure you of persiflage!"
35
"The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance."
35
"Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought."
35
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