Writing Quotes
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We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.
C. S. Lewis
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I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that's helped me in my writing because I'm writing about ordinary things.
Jeff Kinney
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The U.S. is a rainbow of people with an endless scope of stories. My hope is that writing stories about people of color will become instinctual rather than something to be pushed for.
Lela Loren
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If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.
Jenny Lewis
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When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing.
Melissa Rosenberg
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I usually don't have to do a lot of research in my work, as I'm writing about something I'm already familiar with.
Amy Bloom
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I'm a fairly ordinary person - a lifelong reader, a former software engineer, and former math teacher. I come from a wonderful family of teachers, musicians, librarians, and engineers. I think I surprised them as well as my friends and coworkers when I took up writing as a hobby and let it take over my life!
Carol Berg
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Seize every opportunity you have to learn. Keep your eyes and ears wide open and seize life — don't let the moments slip through your fingers like a fistful of sand. Be your own teacher. Let life write your textbook.
Richie Sambora
Bon Jovi
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Writing a song is a long road. Or it can be.
Dean Wareham
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I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they're not. They're not out there waiting. They're not gonna use their intelligence on your book.
Barry Hannah
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There are aspects of writing that require you to image yourself in various roles and guises, to stand in the shoes of others, to 'act' on an inner stage.
James Luceno
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I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.
Lynn Coady
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A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes.
Meghan Daum
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She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.
Sara Paretsky
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I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.
Ernest Hemingway
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All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny implicit in obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down - will perhaps forever be the language addressed to youth by age.
William Godwin
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All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.
Robert Frost
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When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
Claudia Rankine
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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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I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.
David Biespiel
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The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff.
Elizabeth Berg
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It sounds like I'm channeling or something, and I don't really fully understand what it is. I'll get a piece of paper and write down what I think is coming to me. And I'll play it once. Whether it's being recorded or not, I can then usually remember it for a sometimes shocking amount of time.
Ryan Adams
