Writing Quotes
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I never know what I'm going to write next. If I'm still writing the book but I'm very near the end, and I begin to think of what I'd like to do next, then I'll know that what I'm writing is in hand. I'll think of an ending and it will be fine.
Elmore Leonard
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There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.
Elif Safak
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When I was 13, I told my dad I needed to record myself because I sounded awesome, even though I didn't. By 18, I was a lot better. Then I got a publishing deal, so I was writing songs for other people professionally.
Meghan Trainor
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I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.
A. S. Byatt
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I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.
Vikram Seth
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At the time, I was in L.A., just auditioning and hoping to land a part, dramatic or comedic. I started to feel really stagnant, waiting for a part. I was also taking classes at UCB and Groundlings, and at the higher levels, they focus on writing. It was such a relief to be able to write. During those programs, I wrote a one-woman show called Me, Myself, and Iran, and it ended up getting to Tina Fey. She recommended me to audition for SNL, so I got my first of two auditions through her.
Nasim Pedrad
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There's enough dismemberment going on in the world without writing music about it.
Charlie Haden
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I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay's dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.
Mario Benedetti
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If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.
Kevin J. Anderson
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I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.
M. F. K. Fisher
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I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.
Aimee Bender
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I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.
Jose Saramago
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There is a lot to be said for collaboration, and it should be seen as just another way to do things as it is in other forms of writing, such as for television, where it is standard practice.
James Patterson
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I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.
Carlos Fuentes
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I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.
Joan Didion
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I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can't do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be.
David Bergen
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A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
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When I was writing 'Black Panther,' on one level, I was angry because DC would never let me write 'Batman,' so I was doing Marvel's 'Batman,' and Reverend Achebe became sort of the Joker to Panther's Batman.
Christopher Priest
