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The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close...more

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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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Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

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Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings,...more

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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what poi...more

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The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

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If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

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I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries...more

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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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The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little,...more

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The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.