Writing Quotes
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I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.
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I had all these raw, gritty rock records that really inspired me sonically, and so I think everything I listen to when I started writing my own songs kind of came out naturally, and it created this new sound.
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I talk about any number of things on my Facebook space. Politics. Current events. The writing life. The latest tempests in a teapot centering on fandom. Daily doings from my own life. My cats, for crying out loud. Flights of humorous fantasy. Books, both those I've read and those I've written. Movies. And occasionally, TV shows.
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Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
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What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
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Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.
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Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.
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I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities.
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Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith - a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will - but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world - faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.
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How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.
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I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.
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Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.
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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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I have four shelves covered with journals that I've written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I've probably written 100 songs.
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The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
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Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.
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The simple act of writing down a goal and making a written plan for its accomplishment moves you to the top 3 percent.
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People ask me, 'Why are you still writing books?' Like I'm still only writing to make money and as soon as I have enough I'll quit and go fishing? I like to write books. It's the most satisfying thing I do.
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Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.
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I'm not sure if a writer should talk about themes. Themes arrive out of the deeper structure and concerns, but to me, the main thing is getting it down right, writing about specific characters in specific predicaments, and finding a way to be true to the story itself, not only in the first burst of draft but in the revision, too.
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Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.
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You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films.
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I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.
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I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.
