Leon Uris Quotes
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Talent isn't enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you're young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have to have that feeling of "I'll show them." If you don't have it, don't become a writer.
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Usually a good part of the people trying it end up not making it.
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A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.
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I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.
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I was tough. I used everything to my advantage. I could be very ruthless.
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Look at me, man, look at me and tell me I don't know what I'm about. I'm Conor Larkin. I'm an Irishman and I've had enough.
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You usually dont know what you are going to write about so you go to the places and talk to the people who were identified with the events.
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I essentially write for myself.
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To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.
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I was a terrible English student.
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You aren't a true husband/man until you've done the work of a wife/women.
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I've not been right for any man or myself since I met you.
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On one occasion I went to Afghanistan to look at the borders and learn something about the situation there to see if my book was there and it wasnt.
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All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.
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Love can't mature in one room. It has to come out of the full sharing of everything: joys, aspirations, downfalls, all of it. That's the only real path to love.
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The first thing you have to do is get immersed in the project, organizing yourself, knowing what you are going after and not going after. It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find. Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.
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The ability of a person to atone has always been the most remarkable of human features.
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One of the cheapest commodities in the world is unfulfilled genius. All of us want to be known as a unique individual, the one who broke out of the pack. So, you offer yourself up as a sacrifice and what you’re afraid of is losing and being thrown back into the pack. One question taunts you. Do you want to have, or do you want to be?
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Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said...I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore.
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I do not write for an audience.
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Why must we fight for the right to live, over and over, each time the sun rises?
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Who is left in the ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of force within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit will not bow. He is the one man in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk, we have pushed him to the wall.
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Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.
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You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.