William Allingham Quotes
Not like Homer would I write, Not like Dante if I might, Not like Shakespeare at his best, Not like Goethe or the rest, Like myself, however small, Like myself, or not at all.
Quotes to Explore
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of.
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When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
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My own writing has perhaps more of an American flavor than a British one, but that's because the stories I've so far written have needed it. 'Empire State,' 'Seven Wonders' and 'The Age Atomic' are all very place-centric, where the setting itself is almost a character. But there is a universality to story that isn't just limited to science fiction.
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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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The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
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Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
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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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I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
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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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Writing is agony. I hate it.
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From 1999 on - until 2003 - I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications - altogether writing over 150 articles.
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There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
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When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.
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One thing I've had to realize in my career is that I can't do it all. Sometimes we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make sure we're writing the next hit. There are other people out there, and that's what they do every day, and they have strengths that I don't have.
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Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
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I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.
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There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it.
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We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.
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I've never regretted anything I've done, even the things that I've failed at. I've often regretted not trying something really big, because you'll never know.
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Discipline is simply the art of making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy.
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The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance.
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Not like Homer would I write, Not like Dante if I might, Not like Shakespeare at his best, Not like Goethe or the rest, Like myself, however small, Like myself, or not at all.
