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A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

William Maxwell

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William Maxwell
Writer
Emulation
Moved
Reader

More quotes by William Maxwell

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Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
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Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.
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My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.
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Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
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I am the cat that walks alone.
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Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.
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My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.
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The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet
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Your reader is at least as bright as you are
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People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much...But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.
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What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.
William Maxwell
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The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.
William Maxwell
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A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.
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If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
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It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.
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His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
William Maxwell
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If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
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I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.
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It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.
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In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.
William Maxwell