in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us, as readers, as writers, as citizens, have obligations.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
There is nothing so fatal to character as half finished tasks.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
Encyclopedias are like immutable cycloramas, prodigious projectors whose reels have got stuck and which show, with a kind of maniacal fixity, a landscape which, because it is condemned to be only and for all eternity what it was, will at the same time grow older more decrepit and more unnecessary. The encyclopedia purchased by Cipriano Algor's father is magnificent and as useless as a line of poetry we cannot quite remember.
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For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It's not the most social pastime.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
Literature is news that stays news.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Books)
Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
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