Writing Quotes
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Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
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Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.
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I wasted time writing films. I don't look back on those years as lost, but it wasn't what I should have been doing.
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A song like 'Shooting Star' - the thought process behind writing that song was that I looked around and thought, 'Wow, there's a lot of people dying at that time in the music business.'
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The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song.
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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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The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.
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I've thought about writing, but it hasn't happened yet. It's like schoolwork - you start doing your revisions two nights before you're compelled to turn it in.
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We need to include more writers from different backgrounds and ethnicities. We need to see different experiences instead of the same people writing the same kinds of stories.
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During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.
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My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.
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I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.
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Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.
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Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.
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Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?
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My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.
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I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.
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I despise writing in general, but yeah, I love writing the stuff that I direct.
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Everybody comes to the planet with certain gifts. It may be writing, it may be acting, it may be singing, it may be being a lawyer, it may be making a beautiful cabinet, it may be being a spectacular dry cleaner. It could be anything. We all have gifts in different areas.
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When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.
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When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.
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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 can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
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The core of my career is my teaching and my writing.
