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Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

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…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen w...more

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A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he ha...more

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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

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The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

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Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

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Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some ple...more

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Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

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Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticate...more

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He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

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As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

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All raw, uncooked, protesting."(on Aldous Huxley)

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As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravi...more

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I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, ...more

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I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.