Writing Quotes
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I'm not superstitious in my normal daily life but I get that way about writing, even though I know it's all bullshit. But I began that way and so, that's the way it is. My ritual is I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It's a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook and then fill it up.
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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.
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In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
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We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] spent a lot of time writing, for lack of a better word, this manifesto about what we wanted to do. We wanted to find work that was relevant socially and that didn't take audiences for granted.
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Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.
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Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.
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My style is personal, my style of writing is personal, and I believe in that. I believe what comes out of me is an individual thing, and that's why I, I believe in the individual.
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A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.
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Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits.
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Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.
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Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next.
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'
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I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.
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That's been my routine for years and years... Up early before everybody else, before I get connected, before I get bugged, before I have obligations. Get the writing done first, then be the person I want to be in other ways after that.
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So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where writing was considered the worthiest thing you could try to do.
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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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All of my writing career is about how human beings negotiate dark matter.
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The Arab World is writing a new future; the pen is in our own hands.
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For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.
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People call me for the ballads. Apparently that's where I've been pigeonholed. But it's really interesting and really fun. It's my favourite part of the job, writing.
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The process of writing a book is like the process of preparing a dinner. Serving dishes, choosing ingredients and so on.
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I never, ever talk about writing to anyone at all.
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We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.
