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

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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.

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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.