Writing Quotes
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I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.
Will Self
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It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.
William Bernbach
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I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band. I would like to be paid like a plumber. I do the job and you pay me what it's worth.
Steve Albini
Big Black
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After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
Umberto Eco
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When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.
John Edgar Wideman
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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
Paul Auster
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It's assumed that if you're a woman, you want to be the prettiest version of yourself. It always put me in a bad mood. It was like, "OK, I'm successful. I'm supposed to be happy. Well, why aren't I happy?" Part of the problem was that my looked-at-ness had become a priority over my art making. Over and over again it was like, "I don't have time for this. I want to work." I love writing. I don't love somebody putting false eyelashes on me.
Jill Soloway
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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.
Will Self
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I'm just like anybody else: I have stuff to do in the day, whether that's writing a song or recording a song. I try to treat everything I do as just work.
Adam Schlesinger
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If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.
William T. Vollmann
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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.
Louis C. K.
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I want to write an essay called "Fear of Mexico," because I always feel like Mexico's this lover that never writes to me.
Sandra Cisneros
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Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction.
Elizabeth McCracken
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A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
Marguerite Young
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All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.
Robert Frost
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During the process of writing the book, I had this experience that was telling for me. I got it and the basic idea and got the plots and everything, but I wasn't sure who the audience was. I exist in this other world - in the book publishing and magazine world of people who would make fun of this project. We were driving home after two weeks in Maine, and we stopped in a gas station in Massachusetts and saw that Snooki had just been arrested. It was a surreal moment. My last few weeks were spent trying to get in this person's head, and there she was in on the cover of the New York Post .
Valerie Estelle Frankel
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It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
Nadine Gordimer
