Writing Quotes
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I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.
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I used to write letters to the wounded in the Palace Hotel, and I used to drive a station wagon with blood in bottles to a battalion aid station.
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I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
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Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
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I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.
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Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.
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I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.
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I'm just writing love songs. I'm not trying to be pop. I'm not trying to be jazz. I'm not trying to be anything. I'm just writing love songs. And everyone loves a love song.
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I used to think there was something dirty about being paid for something which is a sacred thing to do. I can't disconnect the act of writing music from the act of prayer. If anyone tries to stop me working, it feels like someone is trying to stop me from taking communion.
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I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.
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I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
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I've been writing full-time since I was 23.
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I'm not a compulsive writer. I wish I could be compulsive about something. I have no regular writing routine.
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When I started writing about vampires, I swore that I wouldn't touch the 'Dracula' legend because it's been done too many times.
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I don't want to write things that people don't want to read. I would have no pleasure in producing something that sold 600 copies but that was considered very wonderful. I would prefer to sell 20,000 copies because the readers loved it. When I write books I don't actually think about the market in that way. I just tell myself the story. I don't think I'm talking to a 10-year-old boy or a six-year-old girl. I just write on the level the story seems to call for.
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I never had any lessons. When I first started playing I used to read music. I was very interested in music. But when I started playing in groups I did a silly thing and dropped it. It's great if you can write things down.
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If E.B. White were writing in 2013, would there be a 'Charlotte's Web' trailer and an @SomePig Twitter account? I doubt it. Yet, in a way, he'd be missing out because I'm beginning to think that some of this noise is worth making - and some of it is worth hearing, too.
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Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you’re an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you’re not an artist, at least you can do a good day’s work.
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The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context.
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It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.
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Do you wanna be a poet and write? Do you wanna be an actor up in lights? Do you wanna be soldier, and fight for love? Do you wanna travel the world? Do you wanna be a diver for pearls? Or climb the mountain, and touch the clouds above? Be anyone you want to be. Bring to life your fantasies. But I want something in return, I want you to burn, burn for me, baby. Like a candle in the night. Oh burn, burn for me, burn for me.
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If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
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Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!
