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Quotes by Novelist
"There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant."
126
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
Life,
125
"In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility."
123
"Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings."
123
"Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries."
121
"Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another."
Life,
121
"The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next."
121
"If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?"
120
"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good."
120
"The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth."
120
"That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do."
119
"In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner."
118
"The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know."
118
"The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing."
118
"What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude."
118
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
118
"I think all writing is done through memory."
117
"What breaks capitalism, all that will ever break capitalism, is capitalists. The faster they run the more strain on their heart."
116
"Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred."
115
"This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true."
115
"But everything of value about me is in my books."
115
"The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up."
114
"Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful."
112
"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
112
"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
110
"A book is not completed till it's read."
110
"Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise."
109
"The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it."
109
"Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness."
109
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