Elmore Leonard Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.
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All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.
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I've had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I've had lots of guys call me up. I've gotten two or three commissions to write things. I've written lots of movie scores.
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I didn't live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don't know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.
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There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.
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Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
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You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing.
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I'm a professional songwriter - personal attitudes have nothing to do with writing a song.
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When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.
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Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.
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I have no interest in writing, directing or producing.
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I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.
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However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
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I'm disregarding all the rules I've seen as people approach writing music. I'm trying to break them.
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Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
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Writing is a form of licensed madness.
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The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already. I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it.
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My songs tend to be about love. It drives some of the greatest songs. I'm looking forward to seeing what people make of my writing.
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You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
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The pleasure of reading biography, like that of reading letters, derives from the universal hunger to penetrate other lives.
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Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.
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You come in to work, put that game face on, leave your problems at home, stay strong.
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If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
