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Quotes by Novelist
"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good."
19
"He is not apprehended by reason, but by life."
19
"Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years."
19
"Because I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. You'll see that there is life in the desert, that there are stars in the heavens, and that tribesmen fight because they are part of the human race. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living right now."
19
"Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members."
18
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
18
"Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity."
18
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
18
"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."
18
"What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export."
18
"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."
18
"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."
18
"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity."
18
"People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching."
18
"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."
18
"The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent."
18
"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."
18
"We're living in an age in which everything is allowed, and democracy is being devoured and destroyed by that limitless freedom."
18
"Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
18
"Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know."
18
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
18
"My mistakes are usually so enjoyable that I tend torepeat them."
18
"I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!"
18
"Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb."
17
"I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature."
17
"The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions."
17
"The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts."
17
"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."
17
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