"Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional."
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Quote collection
Edward Abbey quotes (page 27 of 33)
653 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)"
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"Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff."
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"It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book."
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"It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written."
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"Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman."
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"When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best."
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"Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience."
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"In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth."
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"Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in."
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"Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles."
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"Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words."
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"Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times."
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"The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life."
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"The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist."
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"All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience!"
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"My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted."
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"You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings."
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"The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own."
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"Life is cruel? Compared to what?"
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