Jessamyn West Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
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'Skins' is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it's all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it's a good show because it's come from a very real place, and there's a lot of young people involved in the writing.
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All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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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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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 wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.
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I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
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As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
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I mean, the wonderful thing about writing a book is that you're getting a finished product at the end of the day. You're communicating directly with the reader.
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When I'm writing, I spend all my time in The Grocer on Elgin buying ready-made meals; I think they are the only reason my husband and kids haven't left me.
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The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.
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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 have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.
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Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.
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And those Texas sunsets... I work a lot in Africa: Texas and Africa have the best sunsets on the planet, that I've ever seen.
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Besides writing music and surfing, I like to simply chill with my friends. Watching movies and going out to eat are often my prime choices for a day off.
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The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.
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Different people work different ways.
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Because I'm anti-war, I've been called pro-Taliban.
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A printed work, which cannot be read, becomes a product without purpose.
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Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.
