Writing Quotes
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The writer must hew the phantom rock.
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'We’re in danger of losing the ship generation.''I’m aware of the problems,' she said. '‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.'
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Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.
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One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?
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With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.
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Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled. ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody.
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A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.
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A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.
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When you work with people and are friends with them also, you have more of a shorthand. I think people relax more and it opens the door to being less precious and trying things that, when you're shooting and writing, it becomes much more collaborative - therefore funny, hopefully.
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For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.
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My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.
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Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.
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I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics.
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I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.
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Not a word of my writing has ever been changed by another person's hands, and I don't think many screenwriters can say that.
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The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It's easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.
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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.
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I've come to see that these politicians that release books - no way are they actually writing those books. Not when they are working fulltime, too. There's no way. That's their name on the book, but it's not their work. I'm sure of that. There's no way.
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I’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.
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The key to not getting rejected if you're writing for a magazine, is to know to read that magazine and know everything about them before you ever make a submission.
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I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
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I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.
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I started writing nonfiction because nonfiction is well-suited to subjects that, if you wrote them as fiction, people would say, "I don't believe this. This is a little outlandish".
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The cool thing about writing music, writing anything, is that once you publish it, it's there forever.
