Phil Klay Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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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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I love writing songs.
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I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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I like writing flawed women, and being one, it's something I feel I can write with some veracity and authority.
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I was always more interested in my books and my writing than going out. It's OK to say I'm a nerd. That's me.
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There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
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I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.
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Listening to soft music and the sound of the ocean is quite relaxing to me.
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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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I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
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I've had writing sessions with people, but I've never had one where you're just there, and you start making a song, and then it's too good to be true that something really cool will come out of this.
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I associated excellence in writing with New York City.
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The Ewoks were definitely a challenge of writing 'The Jedi Doth Return.' After having done so many things with characters who don't speak English, how was I going to make them stand out? Jedi is also rich with emotional material, particularly Darth Vader's transformation from the dark side back to the good.
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Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
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All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
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Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.
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I grew up in the Boys & Girls Club. That's where I really started playing all sports, and that's why I'm a big advocate for the work they do.
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I will never drink again.
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A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
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Colonialism is known in its primitive form, that is to say, by the permanent settling of repressive foreign powers, with an army, services, policies. This phase has known cruel colonial occupations which have lasted 300 years in Indonesia.
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If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.
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Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.
