A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.
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A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
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Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
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Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.
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Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.
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Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.
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Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
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He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.
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I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.
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I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed - and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.
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I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.
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I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat.
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If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
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Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
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Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman can distinguish between Creative Lassitude and plain shiftlessness.
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May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.
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Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.
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Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.
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Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
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Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don't know who I am and don't care. I sign "Jackie Collins" and they go away quite content.
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The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.
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The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books.
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The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.
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The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
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The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
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The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
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The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
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The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.
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The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
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Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
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Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
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Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
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We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure.
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What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
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You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.
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