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You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teache...more

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That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

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Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so ...more

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Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

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Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them ...more

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A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

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There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand re...more

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The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.

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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to ...more

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Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

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If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody els...more

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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there an...more

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You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

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Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are r...more