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I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

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A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

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We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

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How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

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He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

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... in art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

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I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the l...more

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The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ...more

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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – ...more

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I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the...more

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A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for ...more