Blaise Pascal Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
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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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Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.
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Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
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I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
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I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that's not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.
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You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.
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I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.
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I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
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I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.
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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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My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
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My whole outlook on life is, never judge a book by its cover.
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Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.
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The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.
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A book and a movie are different animals. You need a cinematic perspective to be involved in the motion pictures. And this is something I lack.
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I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.
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I begin each book with a challenge to myself.
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Going to school on a campus where the faculty overwhelmingly disagrees with you, and where the student body overwhelmingly disagrees with you, is challenging. If you go in without a firm foundation, it can undermine what you believe.
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I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.
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The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.
