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I am like a blind pig when I work.
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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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Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
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The echoes of beauty you've seen transpire, Resound through dying coals of a campfire.
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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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Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.
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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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Every day above earth is a good day.
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You must be prepared to work always without applause.
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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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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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Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.
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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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All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
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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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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 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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I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
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Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.