Writing Quotes
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I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
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I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.
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Your life informs your writing.
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The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
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The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.
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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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A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.
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I've been writing pop songs for pop stars for a couple years and see what their lives are like, and that's just not something I want.
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I have been very afraid of writing about other cultures and countries. I've been worried about getting the research wrong. I ask a lot of questions. I try to visit the area. If I'm not able to do that, I search out people from that country who live elsewhere and ask questions.
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All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers. If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants.
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I've included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers.
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I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.
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There are so many forms of love. Spending time with friends, love stories. I enjoy showing my love by baking a cake for somebody and writing his or her name on it, and seeing his or her reaction. I love to offer flowers, too!
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By the time I was doing "Kill Bill," it was so much filled with prose that, you know, I start seeing why people write a screenplay and make it more like a blueprint, because basically I had written - in "Kill Bill," I had basically written a novel, and basically every day I was adapting my novel to the screen on the fly, you know, on my feet.
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My earnestness at the injustices I witnessed when I was writing 'Random Family' may have been my gravest reportorial offense during the early years of reporting. When I discuss the book with students, they often ask me how I could 'stand by' in the face of so much suffering; the egregiousness wasn't my powerlessness but my surprise.
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I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.
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Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
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Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.
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Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.
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Every song that we wrote for the first album made it. We didn't think about writing a bunch of songs and picking the best ones. We had to just make the best songs we ever wrote.
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When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing.
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An Englishman never takes his collar off when he is writing. How can you expect him to show you his soul?
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The first job I had with what you might call human dignity, meaning with an office of my own and a bit of self-determination, was in technical writing, and only after I moved to Tel Aviv, where being a native English speaker is a meal ticket.
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I write pretty much when I can. I used to be very particular about needing certain conditions for writing, but when I had children, I discovered that I was a lot more flexible than I thought.
