Writing Quotes
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Will Fortune never come with both hands full,
But write her fair words still in foulest terms?
William Shakespeare
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What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain.
Sabina Murray
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It's always a better choice to write a new book than it is to keep pounding your head against the submissions wall with a book that's just not happening. The next book you write could be the book, the one that isn't a fight to get representation for at all.
Diana Peterfreund
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I wanted to be a singer, of course, but there was something about the songwriting, then and now, that is the most important thing. It's how I express myself, how I express how I see things. When I see people struggling with emotions and feelings and don't know how to put it down, I'm able to do that. It's really like a therapy, and it's like a buddy and a friend. It's a way out of a lot of things.
Dolly Parton
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If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.
Quentin Tarantino
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf
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I've had trouble being in relationships and writing. This has been a real problem for me. I don't know if it's because I'm not free to fantasize or create these fantasy things about other people.
Lucinda Williams
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In science, you really do need to have a purpose-driven life. You will succeed to the extent that you get the most out of your career so that you can give the most back. Try to be an addict, driven to achieve discoveries, learning new things, and then writing about them.
E. O. Wilson
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Why did Ted Geisel end up writing and illustrating for young minds? He has specific imagery in the book, and we never would have moved beyond the discussion phase, if we couldn't have found an expression for The Lorax, dimensionally, that was true to the soul of what comes through in his simple line drawings, on the page.
Christopher Meledandri
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What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
Virginia Woolf
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Books provide context and allow you to think about things over time. Film is like writing haiku; there is an immense amount of pleasure in paring down and paring down. But it isn't the same.
Geoffrey Ward
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Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons ... Good writing means good revising.
William Strunk, Jr.
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In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.
Danielle Trussoni
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That's the beauty of song writing. You never know when inspiration will come or how it will hit, you just gotta kinda grasp a hold of it and make sense of it somehow.
Kimbra Lee Johnson
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Writing for the stage is different from writing for a book. You want to write in a way that an actor has material to work with, writing in the first person not the third person, and pulling out the dramatic elements in a bigger way for a stage presentation.
Brian Greene
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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
Louise Erdrich
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Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.
Donald Miller
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Charity is just writing checks and not being engaged. Philanthropy, to me, is being engaged, not only with your resources but getting people and yourself really involved and doing things that haven't been done before.
Eli Broad
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When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
Charles Bukowski
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When I first came over to the States, I started writing, I think, as a way to help myself learn English. I would start stapling together little booklets for myself.
Marie Lu
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People often say that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. This is nonsense, of course. It's pretty much one hundred percent caffeine.
Caprice Crane
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Writing a story starts out as a puzzle in your mind, of "What is it I'm fantasizing about right now that makes me think this is going to be worth years of work?" And you just keep pushing and trying to figure it out, and once you've hit on these resonances... Then as a screenwriter, it can be dangerous if you get too hooked on just finding things that resonate with each other, because then you risk getting into stuff that's too neat, and becomes stifled as storytelling. But you do feel like you're on the right track when you start to have a sense of what goes with what.
Andrew Bujalski
