Writing Quotes
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I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.
Alice Englert
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Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog.
Mary Karr
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I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!
Berlie Doherty
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We love writing hit songs. That thrills us.
Matthew Ramsey
Old Dominion
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It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.
Mahatma Gandhi
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I don't like writing straight-up thrillers. I like writing about families hurled into crisis and danger - soccer moms and regular dads and husbands who might have to rescue their daughters or who are, say, hedge fund managers and have one foot on the sidelines watching their kids and the other in nefarious cover-ups and conspiracies.
Andrew Gross
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When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.
Jenny Zhang
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No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.
Elif Batuman
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There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.
Alexandra Fuller
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I don't want to name names because they'd be mad at me if I did, but people who are significant novelists can't get published by real publishers at this point, or have to go through two years of trying after writing a novel that's taken them five or six years and simply can't get the thing in print. Or it gets in print and it doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and disappears without a trace. I mean, it's terrifying. I don't know how anybody can stand it. It's such an enormous amount of work and the economics of it are really quite brutal.
Tony Kushner
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During the process of writing the book, I had this experience that was telling for me. I got it and the basic idea and got the plots and everything, but I wasn't sure who the audience was. I exist in this other world - in the book publishing and magazine world of people who would make fun of this project. We were driving home after two weeks in Maine, and we stopped in a gas station in Massachusetts and saw that Snooki had just been arrested. It was a surreal moment. My last few weeks were spent trying to get in this person's head, and there she was in on the cover of the New York Post .
Valerie Estelle Frankel
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I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.
Leslie Fiedler
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Very curious, at the age of about 13 years, Oswald began to study Marxism and he kept on in his writing, affirming that he was a Marxist. Probably he did want to show himself as a great, supreme Marxist.
John Sherman Cooper
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When I'm not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things... but I feel like it's my job to write about the way things are.
Carolyn Chute
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Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
Ken Kesey
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Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own.
Megan Amram
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I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.
Andre Dubus III
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While I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.
Lisa Morton
