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My Missing Arm
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“I take my work very seriously, and I generally write about something that outrages me as a man. In terms of ‘The Chancellor Manuscript,’ one of the things that outrages me is the abuse that has emanated from the F.B.I. as well as from the C.I.A. and any other agency involved with intelligence operations Washington. I think we have a great need for intelligence, but it has to be kept in balance with constitutional restrictions.”
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“I'm a commercial writer. I'm not in this for arts sake. I'm in it to make money. It's my way of living. My machine is the typewriter. That's my tool. And I tell everybody that; 'This is a commercial business with me'. And a lot of them think this is a terrible thing to say; 'You should do it for arts sake'. Baloney, arts sake! This is the way I like to live. It allows me to do anything I want.”
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“If a woman had written One Day, it would have been airport fiction. Look at The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. If I had written that, it would have had a pink, fluffy cover on it. If Jenny Eugenides had written it, it would have had a pink fluffy cover on it. What is it about? It’s about a woman choosing between two men. What is The Corrections about, by Jonathan Franzen? It’s about a family, right? And I’m attacking gun control and teen suicide and end-of-life care and the Holocaust, and I’m writing women’s fiction?”
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“In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.”
― Out of Africa
― Out of Africa
“As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books. If you are inspired by a good book, there’s always the danger of plagiarism, of doing something that is too much like that good book. Whereas, a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you’re reading is, ‘Jesus Christ, I could write this shit!’ That is immensely liberating — to find somebody who is published who is doing much, much worse than you. And by analyzing why they are doing so badly, this will immensely help your own style. You’ll find out all of the mistakes not to make. ‘Why did this story offend me so much?’ Analyze that. Find out why you didn’t like it. Find out all of the examples of clumsiness or bad thinking that spoiled the story for you. That will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer.”
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My Missing Arm’s 2025 Year in Books
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