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When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear.
-Rene Descartes
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I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers
-Philip K. Dick
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I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.
-Philip K. Dick
Exegesis Philip K. Dick's journal, 1981
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Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, Sir.
-Emily Dickinson
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
-Joan Didion
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An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
-E. L. Doctorow
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The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
-E. L. Doctorow
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
-E. L. Doctorow
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Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
-J. P. Donleavy
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Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
-Carl Van Doren
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What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0300/dubus/interview.html
-Andre Dubus
from an interview by Larry Weissman
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I think what I love most about writing is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it with a whole piece, but sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.
-Andre Dubus
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The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
-Isadora Duncan
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How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.
-Wayne Dyer
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In this new book, I open with a Hebrew quotation nobody is able to understand. This is in order to say, O.K., do you want to play this game? You are my friend, and we go. Otherwise, too bad for me or for you. I think it is untrue that my books are impenetrable. On the contrary, I think I am a sort of great vulgarizer. I put down certain difficult stuff, but I give my readers clues to understand what this kind of stuff is.
-Umberto Eco
Interview: regarding Foucault's Pendulum
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Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.
-Leon Edel
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I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
-George Eliot
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I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
-George Eliot
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An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "New York Post", September 22, 1963
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Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live.
-Lucy Ellman
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Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Representative Men, Goethe, 1850
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Books about Authors & Writing
