Writing Quotes
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I just write what comes to me. I didn't sit down and say ok, here is my statement. It's just a song that has a shout out.
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The creative process doesn’t change much. When writing a song, you’re looking for melody, rhythm and words that people can relate to.
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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
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Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
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If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.
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I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.
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Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.
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The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.
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I don't believe in writer's block. There are good days when you're writing and less good days. I've learned that if it's not happening to walk away and return later. I doodle a lot and often get my best ideas with a pencil in my hand while I'm doodling. The problem is, sometimes I lose my doodles and that's bad!
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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.
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I always knew I was going to do something with music, but with my whole family being in the business, acting was something that was just mine. But when I was 20 or 21, I started writing songs and felt the itch to make a record.
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I think what happens is you write how you grew up. And I was born on the prairie, and so everything is kind of spare on the prairie. And so I'm just used to writing in that way. 'Sarah, Plain and Tall' was that way. And most of my fiction is. I like writing small pieces. Somehow it just suits me.
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We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.
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Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
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Elvis Costello's song writing is so peerless and individualistic. It's storytelling and it's deeply intelligent and clever.
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If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.
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I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
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A lot of artists write about the same things their whole career.
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Careful writing is important for many reasons, not least that intelligent but hurried reporters will trust the presser, resulting in a cascade of secondary damage.
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As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
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I don't work at being ordinary.
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I think people get satisfaction from living for a cause that's greater than themselves. They want to leave an imprint. By writing books, I'm trying to do that in a modest way.
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So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain... and retain.
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After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.
