Writing Quotes
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I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.
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A story is not only meaning, it's music as well.
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I think all the covers I do have nice sentiments, particularly 'Your Song.' People write me very sweet messages about that song, though I'm sure there are people out there saying that I've ruined it too!
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I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.
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I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.
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My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
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Normally, filmmakers would just write a script and cast people to act as certain characters in the story. But in my way of doing things, I have the actors in my mind already, so I'm trying to borrow something that's unique to them. The characters have a very natural connection to the actors themselves.
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I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.
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I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins.
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Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
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In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.
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The 'sent' folder of my email program is really my biggest inspiration and my biggest source of lyrics. That's where I go to pick up a lot of the lyrics that I'm writing.
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Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer.
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I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
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Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.
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My writing's like a journey. I'll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I'll make some of those stops and some of them I won't. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you're going to do. It's all the scenes where your characters really come from.
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When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.
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All I'm doing is I'm filling out my tax returns - or my accountants are, and I'm paying whatever I'm supposed to pay, though I'm giving away a large amount of the money and that probably lowers my tax rate because I'm giving away so much money. But change the law, but don't blame me for the law. I'm not writing the law. I didn't write the law.
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My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.
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I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type.
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Sometimes when you're writing a song, it's work, and you really have to make sure you're kind of pounding out every little piece of it. And then sometimes you write a song, and you turn around and you go, 'How did we do that?'
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Acting, producing, writing, directing - it's all part of something that I believe I was born to be part of.
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You know that gap between where you are and where you'd like to be? Within that gap, there is an ache and an aspirational leap, which is very good for writing.
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Favorite subject? I would have to say creative writing.
