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From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

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I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Gen...more

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I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

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When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working w...more

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I felt like poisoning a monk.

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The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

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Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

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Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a...more

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[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an...more

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In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in th...more

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It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to...more

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But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

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All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one ...more

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In the years when I discoverd the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present,...more