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I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster

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Norton Juster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1929
Born: June 2
Died: 2021
Died: March 8
Architect
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Write
Putting
Phantom
Kids
Perception
Phantoms
Book
Foundation
Ford
Writing
Became
Grant
People
Instead
Urban
Cities
Grants
Started
Received
Experience
Kept

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I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it.
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There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.
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if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.
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You must never feel badly about making mistakes.
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Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them along whether they like it or not.
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Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
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Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality.
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Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.
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You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.
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If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.
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You see, it's really quite simple. A simile is just a mode of comparison employing 'as' and 'like' to reveal the hidden character or essence of whatever we want to describe, and through the use of fancy, association, contrast, extension, or imagination, to enlarge our understanding or perception of human experience and observation.
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I think really good books can be read by anybody.
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The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. “You’ll find,” he remarked gently, “that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.
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And remember, also, added the Princess of Sweet Rhyme, that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.
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The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.
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Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going.
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A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.
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A good book written for children can be read by adults
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You see, to tall men I'm a midget, and to short men I'm a giant to the skinny ones I'm a fat man, and to the fat ones I'm a thin man.
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There are no wrong roads to anywhere.
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