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A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life...more

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[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

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Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half m...more

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As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

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Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.