Writing Quotes
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read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
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In order to even begin to learn how to play his instrument, it takes the guitarist weeks to build calluses on his fingertips; it takes the saxophonist months to strengthen his lip so that he might play his instrument for only a five-minute stretch; it can take the pianist years to develop dual hand and multiple finger coordination. Why do writers assume they can just “write” with no training whatsoever-and then expect, on their first attempt, to be published internationally? What makes them think they're so much inherently greater, need so much less training than any other artists?
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In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.
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I found it more pleasurable to write something, sing a melody over it. At a very young age, I kind of honed my writing skills, I guess.
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'Breaking Bad' - when I started watching that show, I thought it was terrific. I love the way it was shot. I love the writing. I love the arc of Bryan Cranston's character. I just thought that was just really, really a wonderful, wonderful show.
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Groupon as a company - it's built into the business model - is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We've carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.
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I just started writing for my own amusement and occasionally singing in little clubs around Los Angeles. Then I wrote 'The Rose,' and through a series of divine things that I had no control over and had no idea were going to happen, it got in the movie, and that changed everything.
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I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things. For example, when we're backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn't affect me the way in which it did for Freddy [sic] Mercury who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd, which is something I totally admire and envy.
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Reformed theology belongs to this confessional tradition, and Reformed theologians and churches continue to write confessions even today.
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There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.
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I got the acting bug back because I felt like all of a sudden maybe after all these years, maybe I might have something to offer again. I walked away from it after 'Signs' because I just felt I was a bit stale and it wasn't ringing my bells, so I focused on directing, writing and producing.
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I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.
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Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.
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I didn't start writing music until I was a sophomore in college. I would steal my roommate's guitar and sit on the front porch and kind of blend this weird spoken word and these little melodies over simple chords; that really started my whole journey as a musician.
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My grandmother has kept all of his stuff in a drawer. This one notebook was particularly chilling. He's [howard Brookner] writing to his parents knowing he has a death sentence; his movies are how he'll live on.
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My touring isn't about collecting souvenirs and always being on the go. My souvenirs are writing in my journal and creating new music, because that fits easily into my backpack when I'm travelling around the world. It's something that I can share later with fans or with future family members.
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Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.
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I've always been able to survive by writing, though.
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It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.
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Writing music and lyrics that mean something personal to me. It's an exciting, intense, cathartic, this-is-who-I-am experience.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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There's a lot of sub-conscious stuff you may write but you don't then suddenly sit down and take out your analytical books and say: I'm determined to find out where this came from. You'd probably be wrong anyway.
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Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
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I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.
