Writing Quotes
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I encourage all novelists to move to TV right now, that is the way to go. I was living in New York working at a bank as a day job about seven years ago. I was writing novels at night and decided, "Wow, there's so much great TV, and they're telling the complex, interesting, psychologically nuanced stories that, as a novelist, you dream of telling. And it's a healthy, exciting, thriving medium - that's where I need to be."
Nick Antosca
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I've never conceptualized much of what I write about. Maybe, once I'm onto something, I'll conceptualize a finished record. I want the songs to tie together and make sense together. I'm not like, "Oh, I want to explore this idea." That's just not how the creative process works for me. It's more like something strikes me, or finds me, and then I wrestle with it after that. I don't sit back in my armchair, like, "What kind of philosophy can I explore today?"
Conor Oberst
Bright Eyes
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When you're writing about difficult things and darker issues, it's nice to offer some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Some sense of hope. Sometimes, the best way to do that is by offering it in the music, so that you can dance your way out of the darkness.
Jens Lekman
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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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Write while the heat is in you. The write who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. To achieve something you've never achieved before, you must become someone you've never been before.
Brian Tracy
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The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people.
Emily Barton
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Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.
Stephen Collins
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No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
William Butler Yeats
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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
Charles Bukowski
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Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.
Stephen Carter
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As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. 'Don't bother me about my past,' I'll say, 'It's out in paperback now.'
Andre Aciman
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For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence.
Philip Pullman
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I love writing, and I love the solitude of the writing, in that you're just sitting there creating something from nothing, or a new story for characters you love and care about.
John Wells
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If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.
Ernest Hemingway
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The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.
Sandra Cisneros
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I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read.
Gayl Jones
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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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I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
Paul Auster
