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It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

Alan Bradley

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Alan Bradley
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: October 10
Novelist
Writer
City of Toronto
Birth
Braces
Called
Youngest
Names
Daughters
Father
Accustomed
Daphne
Order
Fathers
Brace
Become
Unknown
Ophelia
Long
Damn
Reel
Daughter
Summoning

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I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.
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Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.
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I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
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I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.
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Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.
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To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.
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Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never tired of talking about. I always woke up before the plane landed.
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If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.
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If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.
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I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.
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Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.
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Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.
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Liberals have always been the most fervent Imperialists.
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What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.
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Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.
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During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.
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TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.
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Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.
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The very best people are like that. They don't entangle you like flypaper.
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I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material - something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.
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