Writing Quotes
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I could give you absolutely sterling advice on how to avoid writing, how when you run out of things to do other than going to your desk and writing, when every closet is reorganized and you've called your oldest living relative twice in one day to see what she's up to and there isn't an unanswered e-mail left on your computer or you simply can't bear to answer another one and there is no dignity, not a drop left, in any further evasion of the task at hand, namely writing, well, you can always ask your dentist for a root canal or have an accident in the bathtub instead.
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It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous.
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I like to write pop songs and the stuff I write is fairly poppy, so I thought maybe my lot in life was to write pop songs for people. It never felt right writing songs for other people to sing, though.
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I actually started writing publishable stuff the day I decided I'd actually like to write something I'd like to read, and stopped trying to think what does everyone actually want.
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I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.
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Music is my work, writing songs is my work, touring is my work, going into the studio is my work.
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There's no getting around it: Writing is hard, while working with young performers is nearly always a joy.
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What makes my work my own is where I'm writing from. And I feel like I have a million stories to write about Chicago.
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I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.
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Rush has never been a spontaneous group. We may be spontaneous in our writing, we may be spontaneous as individuals in our day to day lives... certainly I think am and always have been, but I think when it comes to Rush and our presentation of our music it's quite controlled.
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If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it.
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All of my writing career is about how human beings negotiate dark matter.
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I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.
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I feel like I've got so much to do, from a music perspective. Jamie's done his record and traveled around the world with it. Romy did all those writing sessions. I would love to do what Romy's done and experience that other side of the pop machine. It sounds terrifying and, at times, a little bit soulless. That's a real pet peeve of mine, when people talk about songwriting in a cynical way. But having said that I still want to do it, just to know what it's like.
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This business [moviemaking] isn't easy. It's a hard business. You just keep plugging away until you figure it out. You write something you love and keep banging on people's heads until somebody lets you do it.
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My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.
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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 really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
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Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.
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The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.
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I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
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I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
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The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy.
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There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.
