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Quotes by Novelist
"We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'."
35
"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."
35
"We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire."
35
"I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom."
35
"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter."
35
"To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart."
35
"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."
35
"Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors."
34
"Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization."
34
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
34
"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas."
34
"Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others."
34
"I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night."
34
"Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation."
33
"Joseph and his mother come from the black kings who were before the white man."
33
"The planned sit-down reception is an artificial forum where one is presented with a limited number of persons with whom he can hold a conversation."
33
"I'll borrow of imagination what reality will not give me."
33
"Youth is gone -- gone -- and will never come back: can't help it."
33
"Courage will now be your best defence against the storm that is at hand--that and such hope as I bring."
33
"To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself-his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women-a woman-who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward."
33
"A book is not completed till it's read."
33
"No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful."
33
"In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys - literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author - the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter."
33
"Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face."
33
"Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps."
32
"Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose."
32
"Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations."
32
"Because you know that's all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol.""No," the other said. "Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house-----""After this?" Lucas said. "Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get your pistol."
32
"My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it."
32
"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
32
"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
32
"If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction."
32
"Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she'd never see again. She took every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind."
32
"Do something instead of killing time. Because time is killing you."
32
"The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do."
31
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