Writing Quotes
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I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.
Allan Guthrie
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Out of frustration, you do drugs when you can't write. On occasion that might work, but usually what happens is that once you've had on drink, you just want another drink.
Steve Jordan
Booker T. & the M.G.'s
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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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I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.
Jennifer Egan
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I've been acting for so long it's more like - I won't say easy, exactly, but there's not the same angst with writing that comes about with acting. Writing - particularly when you're writing yourself, when it's you, when it's your life, you really can't hide.
Molly Ringwald
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All I want to do is write songs about funny characters I made up.
Wesley Borland
Big Dumb Face
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The tone of good web writing grows out of email. It's more direct, personal, colloquial, urgent, witty, efficient. It doesn't waste your time. It reflects that engagement, responsiveness, and haste of web surfers, as opposed to the more general passivity of print readers.
Jacob Weisberg
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I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.
Paul Banks
Interpol
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I wrote the first draft of the New People quickly but it had been percolating a lot longer. It's a hard question to answer because I'd been working on another novel for years and when I gave up on that, this one came very easily. But I think the work had been going on a lot longer than the actual writing.
Danzy Senna
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A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to let it all out. Or, today's going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.
K. M. Soehnlein
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Film writing and concert writing are two very different things. In film writing I am serving the film and it tells you what to write. I have to stay within the parameters of the film. In writing concert music for the stage I can write anything I want and in this day and modern age rules can be broken.
Aaron Zigman
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Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
Alice McDermott
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Oh, I had an idea for a pilot of my own at the time, and then Carl sent me about eight scripts and simply I threw my idea out the window because the writing was just so good.
Dick Van Dyke
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I stay away from the writing part because I think that if it sticks, it sticks. You just know it. The stuff that doesn't stick, goes away. The stuff that propels you forward, you can see it in your partner's eyes.
Zal Batmanglij
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The amount of response I get, in both a negative and a positive context, is completely related to the amount of books I sell, I think. It seems to have nothing to do with what I'm writing, but what degree of success I'm perceived to have. It's really weird, especially since I spent so much of my life covering people who are famous. It's interesting to actually have it happen to me on some level.
Chuck Klosterman
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In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.
Jennifer Egan
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I had the idea of a boy who was a wizard and didn't yet know what he was. I never sat down and wondered, "What shall I write about next?". It just came, fully formed.
Joanne Rowling
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
Vladimir Nabokov