Writing Quotes
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Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.
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It's probably unprecedented for a filmmaker simply to take the writers' script and treat it as the instructions on the package. What really happens is you pretty much suppress your own instincts - and your own views on the matter - and write things the way filmmakers would like to have them, though the filmmakers often don't know what they want. They can only find out by reading what you do.
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If you only have one shot at writing a headline, there's a lot of pressure.
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It's what I do. I don't deserve any awards for this, it's just music. It's just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.
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Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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I stopped working a few years ago because I just lost a spark that I'd had before. I thought I'd just try writing, and maybe start directing, but I did it very quietly.
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I feel like I've grown up a bit. I'm a bit more confident, and I've been reading more, and I've had a little more time to myself. I went on this writing trip to gather my thoughts about where and who I am in this world, and why we're all here.
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I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
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I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.
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I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.
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I carry around, like, a little journal with me and just write all the time. Not necessarily, like, actually sitting down and writing lyrics - just freeform writing, whatever's going on in my mind. I write a lot on airplanes, actually, because it's completely isolating.
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When I was seven we moved to Orpington, and in my new school, I was kept in for extra lessons to learn 'joined-up' writing instead of playing football. I still think that my poor handwriting and lack of soccer skills date from that period.
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I'm a pretty easygoing person, and it bleeds into the music. Even if I'm writing the most personal song, it's not going to come out totally serious; there's always a little tongue in the cheek.
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It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.
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The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
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If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
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I love co-writing. That whole process is a challenge in that good writers are pushing you.
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I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
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When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.
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I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted.
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I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
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I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.
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Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.
