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If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad.
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What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?” “I don’t know—avant verrais?
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I'm not of the opinion that the next logical step for a book is for it to be made into a film.
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Quarkbeasts, for all their fearsome looks, are obedient to a fault. They are nine-tenths velociraptor and kitchen blender and one-tenth Labrador. It was the Labrador tenth that I valued most.
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We're in a psuedoscientific technobabble.
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Sometimes choice is a luxury that fate does not afford us.
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Being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.
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If it's a chimera alert, we just follows the screams.
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Perhaps fantasy offers imaginative escapism more than other genres.
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If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.
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If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.
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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, O’er a plan to venge myself upon that cursed Thursday Next- This Eyre affair, so surprising, gives my soul such loath despising, Here I plot my temper rising, rising from my jail of text. “Get me out!” I said, advising, “Pluck me from this jail of text- or I swear I’ll wring your neck!
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For an author just starting out, you've got to deliver the goods every year or sooner or people will forget you or you will lose momentum. There is a contract that exists between author and reader.
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I'll tell you what love is" I said, "It is blind devotion, unquestioning self humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your heart and soul to the smiter.
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My mind wanders terribly. I'm not wholly annoyed by my daydreaming as it has been immense use to me as regards imaginative thought, but it doesn't help when it comes to concentration. And writing needs concentration - lots of it.
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Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.
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Scientific thought - indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else - is just like the fashions that we wear - only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band.
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Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.
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Class clowns become actors.
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Aspects that we consider normal today could very well be repugnant in the future - eating animals, for one thing, or abundant choice, or invasive surgery. I was simply trying to demonstrate that what is acceptable today may not be acceptable forever, and vice-versa.
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In the creative industries, there are few things more exciting than a zinger - a thought, idea, line, plot device - anything really, that just totally works in a fundamentally new and fresh way. It's like a uniquely lovely melody or a new taste idea in cooking. Something special, something new, something wonderful. They're also very rare.
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Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.
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The safest course was actually the simplest-do nothing at all and hope everything turned out for the best. It wasn't a great plan, but it had the benefits of simplicity and a long tradition.
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I have the death sentence in seven genres.