Writing Quotes
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I always knew I'd keep at it with the plodding doggedness that I used to master lump-less gravy and wriggle out of fitness classes; I always knew I'd get a zillion rejection slips. I figured I'd write part time while working various full-time office jobs, and maybe, maybe in my 50s, I'd be able to quit and try writing full time.
MaryJanice Davidson
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Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one’s thoughts
Nick Bantock
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I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.
Katherine Paterson
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People ask me what I'm writing. They think I'm Sandra Tsing Loh. Or they ask about stand-up. 'No, that's Margaret Cho.' I really think there is this kind of glomming, that they think we are somehow all the same person.
Sandra Oh
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I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel. Laptops as part of the orchestra, and installation sound, and speakers.
Jonny Greenwood
Radiohead
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When you're making music, it's meant to be shared with people. Sometimes, even if I'm writing a song, someone else brings a vibe. There's something different about it. If someone can play a better bassline than me, I'll let them do it. I'm just here to fit in and see where it goes.
Benny Blanco
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The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.
Haruki Murakami
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When I was very young in London, I had a bank account, which didn't have a great deal in it. I should think at least every three months the bank manager would call me up and threaten to strangle me because I had no money, and I was writing checks.
Peter Mayle
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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.
Brian K. Vaughan
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When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.
Etgar Keret
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I’d recommend learning to accept rejection. Become friends with rejection. Be nice to rejection, because it’s a huge part of being a writer, no matter where you are in your career.
A. J. Jacobs
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I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.
Joanna Newsom
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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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I chose to write about food: food is inherently political, but it's also an essential part of people's real lives. It's where the public and private spheres connect. I wanted to show readers that the larger politics of war and economics and U.S. foreign policy are inextricably bound to the supposedly trivial details of our everyday lives.
Annia Ciezadlo
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Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.
John Lukacs
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I can't listen to music while writing - any such distraction would have dreadful consequences.
Lincoln Child
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If you can't fall asleep, learn how to meditate. I would recommend you listen to a beautiful tape called Spiritual Power, Spiritual Practice Energy Evaluation Meditations For Morning and Evening, 1998. It was the one that got me out of my writer's block when I was writing Caramelo. It's by Carolyn Myss.
Sandra Cisneros
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I think that anyone who likes writing views 'The New Yorker' as the, you know, pinnacle of the publishing world. If you get 50 words published in 'The New Yorker,' it's more important than 50 articles in other places. So, would I love to one day write for them? I guess. But that's not my sole ambition.
Lauren Weisberger
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Well, you're in a theater and it's 24 shots a second, your face, your body, your voice, and it's your craft, the way you earn your living, and it's indelible. It's not like writing a script - I write as well - I can't do another draft, it's done.
William Mapother
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing
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I'm halfway through a novel set in two time frames - Austin in the 1960's and Alpine Texas in present day. It started out to be a small, lighthearted, humorous book about family relationships; I was tired of writing war stories and tragedies.
Elizabeth Crook
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What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.
Jonathan Galassi
