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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

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A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

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I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

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The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. I...more

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The historian records, but the novelist creates.

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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

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The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would ...more

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The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly...more

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The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would off...more

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Unless we remember we cannot understand.

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Most of us are pseudo-scholars...for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empi...more

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Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.