Colin Cotterill Quotes
Dipping a cockroach in ink and having it scamper around the page would have left more legible traces to the average reader.
Quotes to Explore
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I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
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A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.
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For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day.
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I had a financial page to write in the Mail on Sunday where I'd give tips on shares. I worked there for two and a half years. Nothing compares to the burst of energy felt on a newsroom floor when a big story breaks.
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But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
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I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.
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When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
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I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.
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It's not about what you tell the reader, it's about what you conceal.
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Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
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I am what I am. I'm not going to get plastic surgery. I had this discussion with my younger son. We were at a dermatologist, and this dermatologist suggested to me that I wanted to avoid wrinkles. Those wrinkles show that I have laughed a lot in my life, why should I want to erase that? Why would I erase the traces of my life which I loved?
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I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.
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I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.
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Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.
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Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
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I found, after the experience of making 'Shaun Of The Dead' and then returning to the blank page - because 'Shaun Of The Dead' was the first screenplay I ever wrote properly - the experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful.
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I think when you go to a store and you go to the Justin Timberlake page and stream it from there, that's great, but that means you went to the store. iTunes Radio lets you discover it without you having to think about it.
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To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.
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Sometimes I have problems where I get into a mode where even just looking at a page on a screen makes me panic. And getting past that is a really intense thing to do.
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Dear reader, true religion is not gloomy.
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If someone said, 'You can go live in this little town in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks and all you've got to do is sing for us,' I would do that. That's more exciting to me than the prospect of going on some national tour, where you're going to play arenas or sheds every night, because of the crushing repetition of that kind of line.
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God wants you well. God wants you prosperous. God wants you a whole person.
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This claustrophobia was the only weakness I had. It's not my fault. It's just in my mind.
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Dipping a cockroach in ink and having it scamper around the page would have left more legible traces to the average reader.
