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Quotes by Novelist
"I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things.Only end them."
43
"Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence."
43
"...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?"
43
"Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't."
43
"Their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be."
43
"To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser."
43
"The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow."
43
"I've a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die."
43
"There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it."
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"We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best."
43
"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."
43
"It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life."
43
"What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach."
43
"Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience."
43
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
43
"We're staying together," he promised. "You're not getting away from me. Never again."
43
"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."
43
"Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing."
43
"Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer."
43
"When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write."
43
"Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs."
43
"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
43
"But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming-everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else's that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive."
43
"A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride."
43
"Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings."
43
"All that a good government aims at... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities."
43
"I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won't let you go. It's not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you're not, nothing else that you do matters."
43
"Please tell me your master isn't Aeolus.""That airhead?" Favonius snorted. "No, of course not.""He means Eros." Nico's voice turned edgy. "Cupid, in Latin."Favonius smiled. "Very good, Nico di Angelo. I'm glad to see you again, by the way. It's been a long time."
43
"Frank stared at her. "But you throw Ding Dongs at monsters."Iris looked horrified. "Oh, they're not Ding Dongs."She rummaged under the counter and brought out a package of chocolate covered cakes that looked exactly like Ding Dongs. "These are gluten-free, no-sugar-added, vitamin-enriched, soy-free, goat-milk-and-seaweed-based cupcake simulations.""All natural!" Fleecy chimed in."I stand corrected." Frank suddenly felt as queasy as Percy."
43
"Said by Colin the dragon:"It's somewhat bizarre to learn that many of you (humans)think that other humans are somehow different enough to be hated and killed, when in reality you're all all tiresomely similiar in outlook, needs and motivation, and differ only by peculiar habits, generally shaped by geographical circumstance."
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