Tony Hillerman Quotes
The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."
Quotes to Explore
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Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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I was going to try to get into the creative writing program at Berkeley; it's just that the acting thing worked out.
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Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
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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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If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
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I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
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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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Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread.
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I'm disregarding all the rules I've seen as people approach writing music. I'm trying to break them.
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It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.
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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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When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It's them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.
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You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio.
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Comics is still my first love. But I always did other kinds of writing, too, so I think of myself as a writer first.
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I'm so convinced that hiking helps my writing that I recently decided to offer a series of hiking-writing workshops to see if others had the same experience.
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I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it's the only way my writing can operate, if there's something I don't understand.
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I genuinely miss writing now on the rare days I don't write; my mouth waters when I think about writing, and I have an extreme physical reaction to the idea of doing it.
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For the first three years, when I was writing, I was doing sessions with a whole bunch of different people all the time every day until I met Lindy Robbins, who kind of mentored me. And then, once you find that, all the pieces come together.
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With writing, timing is everything. Being in the right place at the right time.
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With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.
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Even if your family isn't quite there for you, find the people that support you and hang on to those people and try to let go of those that try to take you down.
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What's important is self-appreciation.
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The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."
