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Quotes by Novelist
"It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled."
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"All the real things in Russia are done in the villages."
6
"What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians."
6
"Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom."
6
"Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away."
6
"People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe."
6
"Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't."
6
"Until you have lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is."
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"With enough courage, you can do without a reputation."
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"The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author."
6
"New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American."
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"The world, I soon learned, held a different estimate: and I make no doubt, the world is very right in its view, yet believe also that I am not quite wrong in mine."
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"One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants."
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"One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals."
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"There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery."
6
"In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back."
6
"Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered."
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"As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read."
6
"Percy: "You asked Poseidon for" me? Tyson: "For a friend, young cyclopes grow up alone on the streets, learns to make things out of scraps. Learn to survive." Percy: "But that's so cruel! Tyson: "Makes us appreciate blessings, not be greedy and mean and fat like Polyphemus. But I got scared. Monsters chased me so much, clawed me sometimes--" Percy: "The scars on your back? Tyson: "Sphinx on Seventy-second Street. Big Bully. I prayed to Daddy for help. Soon the people at Meriwether found me. Mey you. Biggest blessing ever. Sorry I said Poseidon was mean. He sent me a brother."
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"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."
6
"I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing."
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"About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
6
"Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin."
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"The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present."
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"Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are."
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"If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself."
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"Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth."
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"I held it up, and tried to channel happy dog thoughts toward Cerberus- Alpo commercials, cute little puppies, fire hydrants."
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"The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies."
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