Writing Quotes
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I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
Janet Fitch
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I'm writing about what's happening to me now. I mean, I had a hip replacement a couple of years ago. I have a song about that. And why wouldn't you? It strikes me that that was a huge event. It's kind of funny and horrible and interesting, so why wouldn't one write about that?
Loudon Wainwright III
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I just never really thought of not being involved, because when I write the songs I take them to a certain place and by that point I kinda know what I want them to sound like.
Tom Odell
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Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
Ernest Hemingway
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When you're writing two books a year, you really need some time off and don't want to use that down time for touring. I do like talking with readers, though; they can tell you important stuff.
John Sandford
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You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel.
Lynn Coady
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I had never really written songs for anyone before. With [Broken] Social Scene, you're writing songs for others and your passing them around and exchanging things, but for a man who has the history that Andy Kim had, and has lived the life that he's had, you see such a youthful aspect of how he just wanted to create something again.
Kevin Drew
Broken Social Scene
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Writing a song is like playing a series of downs in football: Lots of rules, timing is crucial, lots of boundaries, lots of protective gear, lots of stopping and starting.
Christine Lavin
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Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.
Peaches Geldof
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There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it.
Eleanor Catton
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I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.
William Trevor
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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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Whenever people used to ask me what I wanted to be when I was older, I would always say that I wanted to be a singer. When I was 12, I decided I would do something about it, so I started writing songs.
Eliza Doolittle
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I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.
Jess Walter
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The key to writing is something to be stolen. How else does one open the door to a house of thieves?
Anthony Marais
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The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day ... you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.
Ernest Hemingway
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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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There have been 700 or 800 songs I've written over the last 60 years, as I went through different periods of writing. I listen and marvel at how different they are and how they still stand up. They are very well done, if I must say so.
Neil Sedaka
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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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Often, when you're in some of these writing rooms for... and the most restrictive is network television, right? They say, 'Wow, that's a great joke, but we can't do that. Okay, let's try the second joke. Oh, you can't do that one. But the third joke you can do,' and hopefully it will be great, but it will remind people of what the joke really was.
Jay Chandrasekhar
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I always played around with writing songs, but when you're spending a lot of time in bars, you have a lot of big ideas, but you don't do much with them.
Dave Gahan
Depeche Mode
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I think having a good agent is key. I've been with mine for ten years now, and she's very honest with me. There are a lot of times I've sent her books that were not so good because I was tired of writing, or panicked about money, and she's told me flat out, "You don't want this to be your next book. Trust me."
Sarah Dessen
