Writing Quotes
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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Jane Jacobs
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There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
Paul Auster
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Good writing is everything.
Corey Stoll
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Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.
Wole Soyinka
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Reading is like breathing in, writing is like breathing out.
Pam Allyn
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I never thought about writing a novel until I was 13, and that happened by chance. I was on school holidays, and I was bored, and I thought I just wanted to do something to occupy myself instead of asking, 'What can I do, mum? Entertain me.' I started, and it really just took over, and I realised, 'Wow, this is an amazing experience.'
Alexandra Adornetto
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When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.
John Ashbery
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It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
Jason Newsted
Metallica
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When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.
Conor Oberst
Bright Eyes
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I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Megan Abbott
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Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.
Tim Ferriss
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Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
Ernest Hemingway
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The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
James Lasdun
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I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'
Kirsten Vangsness
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Nothing improves your writing, I think, as much as your keeping writing.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.
Martin McDonagh
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Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'
Darryl Pinckney
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When I worked in theater, I was always writing things on Post-it Notes and sticking them on screens or desks. Twitter has given me a way of continuing to post those notes, only a lot of other people see them, too.
Maureen Johnson
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Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly. And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.
Achy Obejas
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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
Willa Cather
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We want to avoid pain and have pleasure, so if our early attempts to achieve our dreams fail, we want to avoid the pain of future failure and rejection, so we stop trying and write it off with a broadbrush, "I'm just not driven enough, not well educated enough, not attractive enough, not smart enough."
Anthony Robbins
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To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.
Lorne Michaels