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Quotes by Novelist
"There are parties and then there are huge major blowout parties. And then there are Olympian parties. If you ever get a choice go for the Olympian."
46
"That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque."
46
"It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth."
46
"If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors."
46
"I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women."
46
"She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."
46
"I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin."
46
"He who believes in freedom of the will has never loved and never hated."
46
"If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."
46
"Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us."
46
"Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too."
46
"All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue."
46
"Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours, and nothing is fabulous any more."
46
"What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export."
46
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences."
46
"Of course risk-taking does not always pay off, but it's a lot of fun!"
46
"I think in every country that there is at least one executive who is scared of going crazy."
46
"Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood."
46
"The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination."
46
"A truly elegant taste is generally accompanied with excellency of heart."
46
"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination."
46
"Yet habit - strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?"
46
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."
46
"The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it."
46
"To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating."
46
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
46
"The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by somebody else's rules, while quietly playing by your own."
46
"In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd."
46
"Anyone who claims to have an entirely clear conscience is almost certainly a bore."
46
"But there are some wounds that can never be healed."
46
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