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Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

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This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

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It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

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If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

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I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

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Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

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The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

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Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one ...more

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Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful t...more

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I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

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The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

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As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly st...more

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Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, th...more

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No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpa...more