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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me – that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

Ben Fountain

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  If a person wants to be of any use to himself, he better insist on getting his fair share of beauty and pleasure, and if there’s something about the system that’s keeping him from getting his share, then I think he’s well within his rights to fight to change that.

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  I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.

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  I never listen to music when I’m writing.

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  So many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.

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  Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.

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  Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.

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  I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.

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  Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

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  By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

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  I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That’s a great way to freeze up.

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  There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

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  I kept going back while I was writing the novel – which never sold, may it rest in peace – and by the time it was finished I had too many connections to Haiti to walk away.

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  If you want to write, then write; if you don’t want to write, then don’t write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I’d keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent.

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  It’s amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.

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  I thought when I started writing that I’d have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

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  I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

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