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If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

O. Henry

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O. Henry
Age: 47 †
Born: 1862
Born: September 11
Died: 1910
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Greensboro
North Carolina
William Sydney Porter
Olivier Henry
Oliver Henry
Public
Forget
Story
Write
Stories
Writing
Never
Pleases
Please

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It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.
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If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. Little old New York's good enough for us--that's what they sing.
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The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.
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There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.
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There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
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Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.
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I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.
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In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.
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What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?
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We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.
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There is this difference between the grief of youth and that of old age youth's burden is lightened by as much of it as another shares old age may give and give, but the sorrow remains the same.
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Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.
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Whenever he saw a dollar in another man's hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn't take it any other way.
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Except in streetcars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.
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I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.
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When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard.
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Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.
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A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.
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Broadway - the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.
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He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather.
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