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Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

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That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the ...more

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I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, ...more

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Hard writing makes easy reading.

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Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and...more

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The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is ...more

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By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable...more