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They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
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I am like a blind pig when I work.
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Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.
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The echoes of beauty you've seen transpire, Resound through dying coals of a campfire.
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Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
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Every day above earth is a good day.
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Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
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Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.
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The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.
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I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.
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You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood.
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The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
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If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.
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You must be prepared to work always without applause.
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You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.
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All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
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No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
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The writer's job is to tell the truth.
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I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
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They arrested us after breakfast.
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Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
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The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.
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Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.