Susan Orlean Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Yeah I'm still writing. I've got about 14 tracks now. But we've been on tour so we haven't had time to get back to a rehearsal place.
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I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
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I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.
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Any man who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
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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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I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'
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I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
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People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
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The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
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I'm so damn boring. I like reading and writing and making coffee. And walking. Barry Jenkins likes long walks.
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I am writing to all the churches to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way... Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God.
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There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.
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Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.
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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 started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
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I know now that I began writing in a country where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary - that much the culture conceded - but they were oil and water and could not be mixed.
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When I begin writing, I have no idea what my novels are ultimately going to be about. I don't have a plot. I never consider a theme. I don't make notes or outlines.
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Music can be such a vulnerable thing, so when you're delivering a vocal or writing a piece of music, it's easy to get sideways.
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My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.
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I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.
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Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before.
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Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.
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I think sometimes, when you're on top and all you do is win, win, win, win, win, you get lazy and lose focus. When you lose it opens your eyes and you get serious. There is always a time when it is good to lose, at the right time for you.
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Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.
