Red Smith (Walter Wellesley Smith) Quotes
Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.
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 don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.
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I'm trying to learn to smoke, which is rather weird when everyone is trying to stop. I'm not a smoker. But my character only smokes as an affectation.
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I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.
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I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.
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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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When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.
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Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.
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...Stevens does not think of inspiration (or whatever you want to call it) as a condition of composition. He too is waiting for the spark from heaven to fall-poets have no choice about this-but he waits writing; and this-other things being equal, when it’s possible, if it’s possible-is the best way for a poet to wait.
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If you like what you are writing, just write. Try to keep going before you stop to take a break. Keep going back before too much time has passed. And just stay with it.
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I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.
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From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.
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It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles - physical, intellectual, spiritual - that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing.
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If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.
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I hate being bored when I read a story. Even a well-trod theme can be made fresh by a different perspective or fresh writing.
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Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.
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Being an actor started me writing, and that led to directing.
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Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it.
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There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.
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Christ took your cup of grief, your cup of the curse, pressed it to his lips, drank it to its dregs, then filled it with his sweet, pardoning, sympathizing love, and gave it back for you to drink, and to drink forever!
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Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy.
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There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
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There is a level of appreciation for brothers and sisters in the hood.
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Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.
