Writing Quotes
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True confession time: I never know where a book is going. I get a gut feeling the story is there, then pursue it with the enthusiasm of a hunting tiger on a trail. If I knew where I was going, I'd get bored out of my mind and stop writing.
Jane Lindskold
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I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
Jonathan Coe
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My new favorite thing is to wake up in hotel rooms, and write on the hotel pads. Usually, it's nothing. I leave it in a hotel and get really embarrassed about the maid picking it up, wondering what in the hell I'm talking about.
Caitlin Rose
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When I first started writing, I wrote really sad, emotional songs which were all slow.
Anne-Marie
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I write lyrics. I play the guitar. If the rest of the band had to do my schedule, they would be dead
John Anthony Frusciante
Ataxia
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In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.
Jennifer Egan
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When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
Charles Bukowski
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I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?
Jim Capaldi
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I've never known a writer who didn't feel ill at ease in the world. We all feel unhoused in some sense. That's part of why we write. We feel we don't fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we're not of it. You don't need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.
Andrea Barrett
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I am a bit of a head-in-the-sand person as concerns things happening beyond the walls of my study. And I don't feel particularly guilty about that. I figure that my primary job is producing the very best stories I am capable of writing, and that is what I concentrate upon doing. That is within my control.
Mary Balogh
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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Virginia Woolf
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I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.
Douglas Coupland
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I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.
Charles McCarry
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The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
Billy Collins
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Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
Tom Stoppard
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Some of the best things that have happened in my stories have happened seemingly of their own accord. The writer becomes a listener, just writing things down as they come.
Will Hobbs
