Writing Quotes
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Here's a slightly outrageous tip: Don't respect the text. Just because you've written something down doesn't mean it has a right to exist. If your internal editor can find a better way to say something, junk the original version and go with the new one. If you can't find a better way, and the passage really isn't good, junk it.
Crawford Kilian
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I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.
Anne Tyler
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Me as an artist, I'm more notorious for writing songs that celebrate women, songs that are all about the positive element of the immensely confusing creature that is woman.
Ne-Yo
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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.
Marianne Wiggins
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I think the feeling was that 'Venture Brothers' really has something to sell in terms of a feature. 'Aqua Teen' is an element minute cartoon, and its very subversive and non sequitur and weird. We were writing the one show where we were constantly like, 'God, I wish we had another hour to tell this story.' It seemed like a natural fit.
Christopher McCulloch
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Ever read any Friedrich Hayek? He's great. The Road To Serfdom is like... I'm not a big political-science reader, but I actually dog-eared my copy. I ended up going back through it and writing a précis, I was so impressed by this book. It's all about what happens when government tries to make everything right.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Music - which I could never listen to while writing before I had children - became essential to my process.
Dean Bakopoulos
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Several years ago, as I was transitioning from film finance to film production and writing again, someone asked me how long I would try to get back into filmmaking before I gave up? My response was "giving up" was not an option.
Gabriel Campisi
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Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
Ernest Hemingway
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It took many years to accept that fantasy is the fuel for my storytelling passion, and without that, I really am a hack, writing for money or approval rather than for the pure delight of storytelling.
Kelley Armstrong
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I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.
Deborah Eisenberg
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David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
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I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.
Katherine Dunn
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Sometimes I worry I'm writing 'Fifty Shades of Grey' for teenagers, but I'm not.
Lauren Myracle
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Well, I've always been a character actor, you know, and you always get your share of character actors who are bad guys. So it never surprises me. And if it's good writing, you can find your way into the part well enough.
Colm Meaney
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But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
Virginia Woolf
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The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.
Janette Turner Hospital
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Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
Marshall McLuhan
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You know, I became a director out of necessity. I was writing comedies, and I couldn't find anybody to deliver it correctly.
Albert Brooks
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I basically had the idea when I was 18 that I wanted to write my own songs. I knew it was going to be a long, tough road, and I was like, if I just begin now, by the time I'm 40, I'll be good at it.
Jason Mraz
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Those whimpering Stateside young people will wake up on the Day of Judgment condemned to worse fates than these demon-fearing Indians, because, having a Bible, they were bored with it - while these never heard of such a thing as writing.
Jim Elliot
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I can write for weeks or months sometimes and edit it down to a song. I feel like it's a piece of music that will hopefully stand the test of time and hopefully capture a moment in history if I'm doing it correctly and honestly.
Benjamin Hammond "Ben" Haggerty
