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Quote by William Boyd

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A Good Man in Africa

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Author

William Boyd
William Boyd

William Boyd is a British novelist known for his unique narrative skills and rich imagination. His works span a variety of genres, including historical novels, spy novels, and adventure novels. Boyd's novels are characterized by complex characters and captivating plots. more

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“Certe volte è difficile stabilire se è l'alba o il tramonto. Qui il sole è sempre lo stesso. Quando è vicino all'orizzonte comincia ad adagiarsi, come felice di una morte a lungo aspettata. Oppure, se lo guardiamo da un'altra angolazione, sembra una palla un po' sgonfia che sta per lanciarsi verso l'alto in un impeto elastico... ... Mi incamminai verso la riva, misi i piedi nell'acqua. Era freddo. Cercai di immaginarmi T. Per la prima volta riuscivo a vederla come una persona umana, di carne, non come una vuota bambola di un film esistenzialista. La fisicità con cui la vedevo ora che era morta mi colpì con forza. A lei piaceva giocare con le parole. E capii che io non avrei dovuto giocare con lei, che non avrei dovuto giocare a fare un romanzo. Non avrei dovuto scherzare con la vita.”

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Author:J. Hole
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“I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote "Ethan Frome" that I suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements. When "Ethan Frome" first appeared I was severely criticized by the reviewers for what was considered the clumsy structure of the tale. I had pondered long on this structure, had felt its peculiar difficulties, and possible awkwardness, but could think of no alternative which would serve as well in the given case: and though I am far from thinking "Ethan Frome" my best novel, and am bored and even exasperated when I am told that it is, I am still sure that its structure is not its weak point.”

NovelStructureWriting ProcessEthan Frome
Book:A Backward Glance
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“This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.”

PhilosophyNovelPsychologyNarcissism20th CenturyCzechExistentialist
Author:Milan Kundera
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