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The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.

Arnold Bennett

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Arnold Bennett
Age: 63 †
Born: 1867
Born: May 27
Died: 1931
Died: March 27
Autobiographer
Diarist
Film Writer
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Mother Town
Enoch Arnold Bennett
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Sincerity
Finish
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More quotes by Arnold Bennett

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The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored that is to say, he is not living.
Arnold Bennett
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The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.
Arnold Bennett
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All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.
Arnold Bennett
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If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I've often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn't bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.
Arnold Bennett
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I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.
Arnold Bennett
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You are not in charge of the universe you are in charge of yourself.
Arnold Bennett
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Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.
Arnold Bennett
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Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
Arnold Bennett
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It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
Arnold Bennett
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Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
Arnold Bennett
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Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.
Arnold Bennett
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Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.
Arnold Bennett
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I don't read my reviews, I measure them.
Arnold Bennett
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We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until tomorrow. Keep going... Concentrate on something useful.
Arnold Bennett
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Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her she knows by a process of the intellect but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin's lot.
Arnold Bennett
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Far from the madding crowd is a mistake on a honeymoon.... Solitude! Wherever you are, if you're on a honeymoon, you'll get quite as much solitude as is good for you every twenty-four hours. Constant change and distraction -- that's what wants arranging for. Solitude will arrange itself.
Arnold Bennett
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The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.
Arnold Bennett
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Which of us is not saying to himself which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: I shall alter that when I have a little more time? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.
Arnold Bennett
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Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
Arnold Bennett
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You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.
Arnold Bennett