M. H. Abrams Quotes
If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.
Quotes to Explore
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The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington – wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
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All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that's not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.
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Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
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I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.
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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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My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my childhood.
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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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One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
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Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.
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When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.
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'Seize the Story' takes readers all the way through the process of writing fiction, from beginning to end. Every element, from dialogue to setting, plotting to character creation, is laid out and illustrated with examples. But the tone of the book is not that of a dry writing manual - it's definitely written for teenagers.
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I am truly at my happiest not when I am writing an aria for an actor or making a grand political or social point. I am at my happiest when I've figured out a fun way for somebody to slip on a banana peel.
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Writing is agony. I hate it.
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It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.
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Instead of writing songs for girls, I tend to write albums, which I guess is a bit weird.
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The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
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I had left teaching, which I enjoyed, because I realized I couldn't get tenure at a research university.
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I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.
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One night I went over to get some dope from some Hollywood tough guy. After I left, my son Scott, who was only fifteen, went over with a baseball bat to kill him. I was laughing out of one eye and crying out of the other. I thought, Who am I kidding?
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Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.
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I think viewers quite like it when I'm suffering or eating or drinking something horrible or really up against it in some quicksand or whatever.
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No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
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If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.
