Writing Quotes
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I myself have read the writings and teachings of the heretics, polluting my soul for a while with their abominable notions, though deriving this benefit: I was able to refute them for myself and loathe them even more.
Elton Welsby
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My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships.
Deborah Tannen
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I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing.
Alistair Maclean
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If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.
Ernest Hemingway
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I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing, I was always supporting myself. That's the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression.
Peter Carey
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Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.
K. M. Soehnlein
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Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.
Jerry Pournelle
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I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
Dave Eggers
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Having books published is very destructive to writing.
Ernest Hemingway
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I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution - they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
Paulo Coelho
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Keep things informal. Talking is the natural way to do business. Writing is great for keeping records and putting down details, but talk generates ideas. Great things come from out luncheon meetings which consist of a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a good idea or two. No martinis.
T. Boone Pickens
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With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."
Quentin Tarantino
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James
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The idea that you waited for that particular issue to come out, but then you planned your TV viewing for the coming season, it was a completely different world. And I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, so there was a TV critic writing for the Miami Herald, Jack Anderson, that was very influential. Just to read, every morning, somebody who cared about TV as much as I did - they were an adult, and they were clearly being paid for it. That was an "a ha!" moment for me before I was even 10.
David Bianculli
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I was writing a story, 'The Artistic Career of Corky,' about two young men, Bertie Wooster and his friend Corky, getting into a lot of trouble, and neither of them had brains enough to get out of the trouble. I thought: Well, how can I get them out? And I thought: Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet?
P. G. Wodehouse
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The trouble with writing for the web is that writing is about getting people to forget they're reading. Anything that reminds them they are reading, or which annoys or distracts them, bounces them out of the world. And the web, it seems to me, is all bounce. A very, very difficult medium to write for.
Geoff Ryman
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I got into the business because I love writing. When it came down to finding my voice, which every writer has to take time to do, I think I realized I write black people very well. I write us in a very honest way, and I want to hear the way we really talk.
Lena Waithe
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Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
Jason Robert Brown
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Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.
Terry Brooks
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Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.
William Boyd
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For me, it's been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
Cynthia Leitich Smith
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I'm very impressionable: I get very taken away by stories and certain feelings. With writing, sometimes I want to feel like a character.
Kevin Morby