Writing Quotes
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It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.
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Nobody's going to write a book about me, because nobody's going to find anything worth writing a book about.
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Let's start at the very end: The postscript of Stephen King's 'On Writing' contains some of the most harrowing pages he has ever written. It's here that King describes the traffic accident that nearly killed him in June 1999.
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I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.
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I've always found it pretty difficult to write a happy song.
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Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.
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I've been writing for people long enough to know that it has got to feel comfortable coming out of their mouths, especially when you're doing something that is first person and is so near and dear to you.
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When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
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I love the structural part of the writing process.
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I have a lot of reactions to the outside world that I don't feel like would be appropriate for songs: things I'm not interested in writing about, things I don't want to think about any longer than 15 or 20 seconds.
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I like contemporary, bare-boned writing. I don't like having the language that I barely understand get in the way of me interpreting it over to an audience. It's this barrier that I don't want to have to attack.
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I'm constantly coming up with new strategies for getting to the mental place where writing is so joyous and playful that I almost can't help putting the words down.
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I tend to discourage people from calling me 'Sir Ian,' because I don't like being separated out from the rest of the population. Of course, it can be useful if you're writing an official letter, like trying to get a visa or something passed through Parliament. They're impressed by these things.
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There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.
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I used to think I'd like to be a fireman - in fact, I still would - and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.
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A friend of mine who is in the publishing business knew I was writing a book, and he said, 'Have you said anything yet about the good guy? Because I know you spend so much time with the bad guys.' Because they're fun. So then you have to make the good guy fun, in order to compete. That's the challenge.
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After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.
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The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.
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'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams is a great play. I had to read it for school when I was younger, but I started writing scripts after that. That's what got me into writing.
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I've always viewed writing as an outlet for being vulnerable and all that comes with that. You are able to let things all out.
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I don't believe in writing anything that I don't know about or haven't researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.
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I don't want to bore myself, so I'm always writing new music. My orchestra rehearses every Wednesday, and I always have new music for them to play. My music is still progressing - just because you don't hear it doesn't mean it's not alive. The music is complicated, but it's about emotion. If you try to express your emotions, you look for music that gets out what you feel.
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Whether I'm writing for myself or someone else, I'll always write a song that I would feel comfortable singing.
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Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.
