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To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.

Robertson Davies

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Robertson Davies
Age: 82 †
Born: 1913
Born: August 28
Died: 1995
Died: December 3
Journalist
Literary Critic
Musicologist
Novelist
Playwright
Professor
Reporter
Writer
William Robertson Davies
Serious
Spiders
Asks
Thread
Right
Guts
Writing
Hopes
Work
Author
Like
Asking
Autobiographical
Gets
Buys
Writer
Spider

More quotes by Robertson Davies

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Oh hearts! Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before.
Robertson Davies
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Whoever declares a child to be delicate thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
Robertson Davies
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Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
Robertson Davies
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Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.
Robertson Davies
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On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.
Robertson Davies
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Civilization rests on two things, said Hitzig the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?
Robertson Davies
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Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.
Robertson Davies
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The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
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The egotist is all surface underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn't consider important in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.
Robertson Davies
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Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.
Robertson Davies
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And I say to you that if you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.
Robertson Davies
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The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.
Robertson Davies
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Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind.
Robertson Davies
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Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman.
Robertson Davies
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Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
Robertson Davies
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If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
Robertson Davies
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here are some homosexuals whom we would do well to take seriously.
Robertson Davies
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A big man is always accused of gluttony, whereas a wizened or osseous man can eat like a refugee at every meal, and no one ever notices his greed.
Robertson Davies
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These matters require what I think of as the Shakespearean cast of thought. That is to say, a fine credulity about everything, kept in check by a lively skepticism about everything.... It keeps you constantly alert to every possibility.
Robertson Davies
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I think of the author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, 'I will tell you a story' and then he passes the hat.
Robertson Davies