STET
Diana Athill

Since then I have often noticed that it is not good for people to start a venture with enough-not to mention too much-money; it is hard for them to learn to structure it properly, simply because they are never forced to.

Everything that makes life worth living is the result of humankind's impulse to fight the darkness in itself, and attempting to understand evil is part of that fight.

Book: Into that Darkness - Gitta Sereny

Author: Jean Rhys

Books:
Michael Anthony: The Year in San Fernando
John Gardner: Grendel
Michael Irwin: Working Orders and Striker
Chaman Nahal: Azadi
Merce Rodoreda: The Pigeon Girl

Morris Stock: Parents Unknown: A Ukrainian Childhood
Daphne Anderson: The Toe-Rags

No doubt all writers know in their heads that their publishers, having invested much money and work in their books, deserve to make a reasonable profit; but I am sure that nearly all of them feel in their hearts that whatever their books earn ought to belong to them alone.

Authors:
Mordechai Richler - Barney's Version
Brian Moore
Alfred Chester

...I do think it is impossible to spend the first eighteen years of your life in a given set of circumstances without being shaped by them...

It is natural that a writer who knows himself to be good and who is regularly confirmed in that opinion by critical comment should expect to become a best-seller, but every publisher knows that you don't necessarily become a best-seller by writing well. Of course you don't necessarily have to write badly to do it; it is true that some bestselling books are written astonishingly badly, and equally true that some are written very well. The quality of the writing---even the quality of the thinking--is irrelevant. It is a matter of whether or not a nerve is hit in the wider reading public as opposed to the serious one which is composed of people who are interested in writing as art.

Once, when he [V.S. Naipaul] was particularly low, we talked about surviving the horriblness of life and I said that I did it by relying on simple pleasures such as the taste of fruit, the delicious sensations of a hot bath or clean sheets, the way flowers tremble very slightly with life, the lift of a bird's flight...

Diana Athill: Make Believe

Years ago, in a pub near Baker Street, I heard a man say that humankind is seventy per cent brutish, thirty per cent intelligent, and though the thirty per cent is never going to win, it will always be able to leaven the mass just enough to keep us going.

Author: Molly Keane
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