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Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have ...more

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You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

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What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.

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I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

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Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy o...more

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You can make anything by writing.

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You can make anything by writing

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I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly...more

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It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

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In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.

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In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thin...more

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Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.