Writing Quotes
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I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
Saul Bellow
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I've had a lot of writers, in particular, who said they got into writing because of the 'Van Dyke Show.' They said it looked like fun.
Dick Van Dyke
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I believe artists should be able to step into other people's situations, contexts and cultures and work from there. If artists don't have that freedom, then, as someone has said, are we all writing our autobiographies?
Uwem Akpan
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I care what my reader thinks. There is no fancy recommendation you can give me that would matter to me as much as Mary Jane from Youngstown writing me a letter. There is not one. Don't need it, don't want it, don't require it, does not fill up my soul. It's about her, not about the rest of it.
Adriana Trigiani
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I always have to be thinking about who's going to be singing this song, what the context is. I don't sit around just writing in a vacuum, ever.
Adam Schlesinger
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I would get a lot of writing done if I lived in isolation in a cave under a swamp.
Claire Cameron
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Writing 'This Is Who I Am...' I wanted to write a song about where I'm at, that I have accepted where I have come to and I wanted my fans to be able to connect to it too. I want them to stand proud!
Vanessa Amorosi
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So much of writing is discovery. Sometimes I feel like a rat in a maze, trying to discover the way out. My little heart is beating, and I'm racing down a path thinking, this is the route, it will get me there, as I turn this way and then that.
Will Hobbs
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I feel like I write the same album every time but each time I try to convey the message more simply.
Jason Mraz
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I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.
Paul Auster
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There's nothing wrong with the screaming style of singing, and I'll be the first to admit that it conveys an emotion. But I'm getting older, and I can't scream and shout about the same things anymore. The songs I'm writing with Stone Sour call for a lighter, different approach.
Corey Taylor Stone Sour
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To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.
William Feather
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I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.
Eileen Myles
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Be undeniably good. When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them & nobody ever takes note of it 'cause it's not the answer they wanted to hear-what they want to hear is here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script, here's how you do this-but I always say, “Be so good they can't ignore you.” If somebody's thinking, “How can I be really good?” people are going to come to you. It's much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.
Steve Martin
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Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.
Scarlett Thomas
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Writing about craft has forced me to think more about my own writing technique, and to break down my process in ways that have been enormously helpful to me.
David B. Coe
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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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The habit of committing our thoughts to writing is a powerful means of expanding the mind, and producing a logical and systematic arrangement of our views and opinions. It is this which gives the writer a vast superiority, as to the accuracy and extent of his conceptions, over the mere talker. No one can ever hope to know the principles of any art or science thoroughly who does not write as well as read upon the subject.
William Blaikie
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If someone writes a great story, people praise the author, not the pen. People don't say, 'Oh what an incredible pen...where can I get a pen like this so I can write great stories?' Well, I am just a pen in the hands of the Lord. He is the author. All praise should go to him.
Keith Green
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You know, I've always wrote my best stuff when it takes me hardly any time at all. Actually I wrote.....this is actually a really funny story...'Ghost Of Vincent Price', I've been wanting to write a song about Vincent Price coz he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
Joseph Michael Poole
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I'd always been really intimidated by prose writing.
David Rees
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My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.
David Eagleman
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To be the windowpane - this is basically a bastardization of what Orwell said about good writing - so you can get the conversation going and frame it the right way and make sure people aren't lost. And then you let the candidates illuminate the issues themselves.
John Dickerson