quotes from classic

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldn't turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

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The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

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Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.

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It's something that I feel I know about, relationships between men and women. I like to write from the woman's point of view now and again, to get inside her head, to feel what she's feeling.

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I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

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A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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And though hard be the task, 'Keep a stiff upper lip'.

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Death comes not to the living soul, nor age to the loving heart.

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Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.

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When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.

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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

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A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

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The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

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Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

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I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.

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I'm hugely self-critical in the morning.

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