Writing Quotes
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Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
Mary Stuart Masterson
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I think you find stories with fresh perspectives, and there can be a danger in the opposite way when you start getting too cynical and things just don't start seeming like stories, and things don't seem exciting anymore. It's like, 'Yep, this is my fourth caucus, and I know everybody and know everything and I am writing just to impress my friends.'
Amy Chozick
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Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days.
Joanne Rowling
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The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
V. S. Pritchett
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Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.
Jasper Fforde
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My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.
Martine Syms
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I feel that the thing about film and particularly about TV, actually, is it's being created now. We're living in the best time so far because there are many more women writing and women directing, women producing, and people are finally catching on to the fact that women want to go and buy tickets to see female characters and more than one in a film. So I actually think it's a very fertile time to be a woman over 40.
Cynthia Nixon
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For my type of story and my kind of writing, I think 'Vanity Fair' is the right forum.
Dominick Dunne
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I love writing Scottish dialogue.
John Niven
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The really good stuff- the 'Hamiltons' - comes out after decades of writing and being committed.
Alice Ripley
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To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
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Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.
Arthur Smith
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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.
Andrew Solomon
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The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as another.
Ernest Hemingway
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To know nothing, or little, is in the nature of some husbands. To hide, in the nature of how many women? Oh, ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners' bills? How many of you have gowns and bracelets which you daren't show, or which you wear trembling?--trembling, and coaxing with smiles the husband by your side, who does not know the new velvet gown from the old one, or the new bracelet from last year's, or has any notion that the ragged-looking yellow lace scarf cost forty guineas and that Madame Bobinot is writing dunning letters every week for the money!
William Makepeace Thackeray
