“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” – Aldous Huxley from The Doors of Perception

“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of Cancer Ward

“All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.” – Anthony Burgess, author of a whole stack of books, including A Clockwork Orange

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz”. Pictured here with Zelda and their daughter, Frances.

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird

“There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.” – Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence

“A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.” – Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood

“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever. – Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart

“People always say things like, Oh, well, he was suffering so much that he was better off dying. But that’s not true. You’re always better off living.” – Dashiell Hammett , author of The Maltese Falcon

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” – Henry James, author of Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” – Ernest Hemingway, outside Shakespeare and Company in Paris

“Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.” – Iris Murdoch, author of The Black Prince and A Severed Head

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.” – James Baldwin, author of Go Tell It on the Mountain

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.” – Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” – Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” – Kurt Vonnegut, author of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have. – Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, author and playwright

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.” – Julian Barnes, From “The Sense of an Ending”.

“Life calls the tune, we dance.” – John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” – Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.” – Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.” – Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Jar

“Our imagination flies — we are its shadow on the earth.” – Vladimir Nabokov, chasing his second passion—butterflies.

“Language is a virus from outer space” – William S.Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch

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