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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 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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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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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.

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I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

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Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

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When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who ...more

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... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, ...more

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So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

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What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [in...more