Quote

If you tell an amateur that his story is not good, he always declares indignantly: 'Oh, but it really happened just like this!' The writer who doesn't understand that this is beside the point is not a writer at all.

Ayn Rand

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Ayn Rand
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: February 2
Died: 1982
Died: March 6
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
St. Petersburg
Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum
Understand
Indignantly
Tell
Declares
Doesn
Amateur
Stories
Beside
Really
Writer
Good
Happened
Always
Story
Like
Point

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Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
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The problem is not those who dream, but those who can only dream.
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A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.
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One must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision...No discussion, cooperation, agreement, or understanding is possible among men who substitute emotion for proof.
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Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.
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You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated
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Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.
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A 'whim' is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
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If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
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The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.
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It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices.
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The more neurotic and evasive a person is, the shorter the range of his interests.
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Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.
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It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for.
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The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time.
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The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world
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A free mind and a free market are corollaries.
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Any group or collective, large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
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I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.
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