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There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, Mistakes were made, you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Charles Baxter

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Charles Baxter
Mistake
Sound
Action
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Weasel
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Weasels
Made
Deprive
Like
Mistakes
Poetry

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As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.
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If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.
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I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.
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What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.
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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
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When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.
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At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
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Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
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At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
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Everybody should customize their names.
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Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
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The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
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It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.
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Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
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A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
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[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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