Writing Quotes
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Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.
Etgar Keret
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When you're an artist, your personal life and your professional life kind of blend together. I'm writing from home so I don't have an office or anything. I don't know where to draw the line between "Okay, let's stop now and watch American Idol."
Daryl Wein
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I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.
Jennifer Egan
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I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
Ernest Hemingway
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The comforts come from my movie and television writing. It is unusual to live this well simply from books.
Anatoly Rybakov
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The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides...It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.
Seth Godin
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Most of the time I was in the Northeast, I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my material for writing.
Bobbie Ann Mason
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A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
Raymond Chandler
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If I had had a thing like an iPad when I was a kid, then I never would have gotten into the habit of writing things down by hand.
Joe Haldeman
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What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain.
Sabina Murray
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Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.
Jim Harrison
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It's really important to visit a site you are writing about. Even if you know it well, even if you have lived there, it's important to take a fresh look in terms of your characters and your story.
Marge Piercy
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Communication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You've spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening?
Stephen Covey
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I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
Maya Angelou
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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.
Peter Morgan
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Easy writing makes hard reading.
Ernest Hemingway
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As was the case in 'Darth Plagueis' - even going back as far as 'Cloak of Deception' - I was well aware that I was writing what used to be called 'men's adventure' fiction.
James Luceno
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The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.
Quentin S. Crisp
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That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.
Jincy Willett
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My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.
Philip Roth
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I was born in Philadelphia, and I've tried to escape that city all my life. I end up writing plays that force me back to Philadelphia, at least psychologically if not physically.
Lyle Kessler
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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?
Charles Stross
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My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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This motivation was at work in both Christian and non-Christian circles. We know this because ancient authors actually tell us so. For example, a commentator on the writings of Aristotle, a pagan scholar named David, indicated: “If someone is uninfluential and unknown, yet wants his writing to be read, he writes in the name of someone who came before him and was influential, so that through his influence he can get his work accepted.
Bart Ehrman