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counterpart. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page. p 100

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience... connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, and when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain

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of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.

p 90

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.

Cyril Connolly - Enemies of Promise

Firbank, like most dandies disliked the bourgeoisie, idealized the aristocracy and treated the lower classes as his brothel...

It is customary to assume that Firbank was frivolous because frivolity was his only medium of self-expression. In fact he was no less serious than Congreve or