Writing Quotes
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It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
Yusef Komunyakaa
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When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
Flannery O'Connor
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I was writing a lot even as a kid.
Hailey Gates
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I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
Umberto Eco
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I'm very involved in the writing on every level.
Fran Drescher
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I listened to country music my whole life. I started writing music when I was a teenager. It all came out country.
Laura Bell Bundy
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It's not comfortable for me to write about my family. I'm not comfortable writing about me.
Karl Rove
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The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.
Karen Thompson Walker
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One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Years ago, when I was writing westerns, other writers who were friends of mine wanted me to collaborate with them. And it just didn't work.
Gary Paulsen
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For me, my writing benefits from my experience.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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People have these incredible expectations. So instead of being inspired by, say, Joni Mitchell's music, I look at it and say to myself, 'I'm going to quit - why would I think of writing or performing after listening to that?'
Idina Menzel
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There's not a whole lot to do in Athens. When I was 13, I just started entertaining myself by writing songs. I'd sit in my room for 10 hours playing the same song, stacking vocals, trying out different drum beats, realizing no one would ever hear this but having so much fun. I guess I got my voice from just doing that so often.
Brittany Howard
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
Beck
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I have chosen to keep my personal life separate from my music, as the two are exclusive from each other, and I want to remain that way. I'll talk music, production, writing songs, touring with anyone but keep religion, politics and world affairs off the table, as my expertise is in songs and music.
Randy Bachman
The Guess Who
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It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
Ian Mcewan
