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He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really ...more

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Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

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Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

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It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of fa...more

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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores...more

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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its p...more

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This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, the...more

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Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotion...more