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Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.
-Toni Morrison
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There's more of yourself in a book than a play. that's why we know all about Dickens and not much about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.
-Sir John Mortimer
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The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
-Sir John Mortimer
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Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
-Iris Murdoch
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Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky
-Vladimir Nabokov
The Defense foreword
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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
-Vladimir Nabokov
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I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
-V. S. Naipaul
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For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
-Howard Nemerov
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The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned. The first thought is this: fear. I cannot write because I am afraid. Of what?
-Howard Nemerov
Journal of the Fictive Life, 1965
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I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
-Pablo Neruda
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Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.
-Dudley Nichols
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To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.
-Harold Nicolson
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I have used these weeks to revalue values. Do you understand this expression? When you come right down to it, the alchemist is the most praiseworthy of men: I mean the one who changes something negligible or contemptible into something of value, even gold. He alone enriches, the others merely exchange. My task is quite singular this time: I have asked myself what mankind has always hated, feared, and despised the most
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Letter to Georg Brandes, May 23, 1888
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Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.
-Peggy Noonan
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A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.
-Gregory Nunn
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It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
-Flannery O'Connor
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Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
-Flannery O'Connor
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The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.
-Michael Ondaatje
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A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you
-George Orwell, "Horizon", April, 1947
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Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
-George Orwell
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All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
-George Orwell
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For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
-George Orwell
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I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
-George Orwell
Why I Write
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Books about Authors & Writing
