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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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(...) Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jor...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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No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

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Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white?

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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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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

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When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere b...more

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My head is a hive of words that won't settle.

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And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women d...more

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For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, ...more

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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.