Al Purdy Quotes
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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Cancer has taught me a lot of things. Maybe it is the best thing that has happened to me. I can't say right now, but maybe some years down the line, I would realise. When I was taking chemotherapy, there were a lot of elderly patients, and that would inspire me. I thought, 'If they can be cured, why can't I be?'
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Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
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Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
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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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Hard writing makes easy reading.
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One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.
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I don't think I'd ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.
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I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.
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When I'm writing, I spend all my time in The Grocer on Elgin buying ready-made meals; I think they are the only reason my husband and kids haven't left me.
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We all need to focus on our writing. Because the millions of readers out there don't care about your blog.
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I'm an intense guy. I run 10 miles a day, which helps alleviate my intensity. Also, singing helps defuse my intensity. Playing the piano helps, and writing helps.
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Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
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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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When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
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I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent, and I'm not your mommy; I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
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I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
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There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
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I got away from comedy because it wasn't being done in the way that I loved and the way that I could do it. It made me sad because I felt like it wasn't appreciated and no one was writing it so, 'I'll abandon it.
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The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone.
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I got two older brothers and two younger sisters, and we grew up in the country, and we were a little feral. So as long as the car didn't end up in the rhubarb and you didn't get caught for doing whatever you were doing, you were fine.
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There is a level of appreciation for brothers and sisters in the hood.
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I started writing when I was about thirteen.
