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Quotes by Novelist
"Because I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. You'll see that there is life in the desert, that there are stars in the heavens, and that tribesmen fight because they are part of the human race. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living right now."
25
"From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment."
24
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
24
"Realism can break a writer's heart."
24
"I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar."
24
"Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults."
24
"They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad."
24
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
24
"I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies."
24
"I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is."
24
"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."
24
"A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy."
24
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool."
24
"It is such a secret place, the land of tears."
24
"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
24
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."
24
"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."
24
"I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity."
24
"Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were."
24
"Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost."
24
"Being reliable is something. Being good."
24
"You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you."
24
"And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita."
24
"The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent."
24
"Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?"
24
"At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood."
24
"Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction."
24
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