Writer Quotes
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It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
Gerald Brenan
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The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.
Alicia Ostriker
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A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn't match the world.
Kay Ryan
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Robert Smigel is one of the greatest comedy writers in the last 50 years. "TV Funhouse" and Triumph and all those sketches. He's really unique, and he has an amazing comedy mind.
Neal Brennan
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Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Annie Dillard
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Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write. She was a wonderful child writer. I mean, she wrote beautiful essays and stories as a child. And Marie Souvestre really appreciated Eleanor Roosevelt's talents and encouraged her talents. Also, she spoke perfect French. She grew up speaking French. She's now at a french-speaking school where, you know, girls are coming from all over the world. Not everybody speaks French.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
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Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.
Andrew Shaffer
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Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and pithy, but it can easily cause confusion and obscurity and must be used with skill.
Bergen Evans
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I regretted it. But it can’t be avoided. A writer has to use everything he has. If you want to write, you have to be willing to be a son of a bitch sometimes.
Brian Morton
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Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.
Elena Ferrante
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I wrote about the life of a housing officer in Britain, in a pretty rough area of London. Maybe it was because I'm a big-mouth and an exhibitionist, and I'm slightly egotistical. All those things have to come together for a writer.
Ben Richards
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The main thing that drew me to him was that he was a beautiful writer, not just the clarity but the aptness of expression.
Charles Fried
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My idea of teaching literature is just to read great passages aloud or to look at it the way a writer does, which is what I try to do. Which is to say, 'How does this writer do this? How did he order his scenes? Do you notice any pattern to his sentences?'
Ethan Canin
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The writer studies literature, not the world.
Annie Dillard
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If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.
Eric Bentley
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When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don't have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It's like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic.
Haruki Murakami
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I do find that people are incredibly naive about what it is to be a writer. Like you would pay an incredible amount of money for an MFA program and still not have the slightest idea of how one goes about becoming a writer. So, I'm always flabbergasted when people say, "Oh, I was invited to do a reading, but I'm not going to read because I don't have a book.".
Faith Adiele
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A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
Franz Kafka
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My impression of him, and the impressions of everyone in the office, was he is a very fine lawyer, a very hard worker, a beautiful writer and absolutely, meticulously objective.
Charles Fried
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Well, I went to [Hitchcock's] house every day for about three weeks, and I realized that every time I brought up the subject of Mary Deare, he would change the subject. So, I began to suspect that he didn't know any more about how to do the picture than I did. Finally, I went to his house one morning and said, "I've got bad news for you, Hitch. You'll have to get another writer. I don't know how to write this picture." And he said, "Don't be silly, Ernie. We'll do something else." And I said, "But what'll we tell MGM?" And he said, "We won't tell them a thing." And that's how it evolved.
Ernest Lehman
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I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.
Alan Alda
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But it is not at all unthinkable for anyone to tell a writer how to write. It comes with the territory.
Ernest Lehman
