Writing Quotes
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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.
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The only difficult thing is learning to recognise the interesting bits from those millions of moments life provides you with every day and writing down those snippets.
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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
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Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.
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To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.
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I've always thought that whether I'm writing or not, I've gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they're mine. I'm not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I've gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.
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I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
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I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth
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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.'
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I've done a lot of collaboration over the years, but right now I'm enjoying writing by myself and just being me again for a while.
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The Lampoon was definitely quite formative. You know there's a crazy like kind of network of comedy writers from The Lampoon that are, that kind of you know like Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a lot of shows kind of had a lot of kind of Lampoon writers and so that was very formative. I mean, to me I got interested in comedy writing at an early like reading like Dave Barry.
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Writing checks for charities is necessary and important. But it can't compare with corporal works of mercy, which are infinitely greater.
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It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.
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I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.
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What makes for great art is the courage to speak and write and paint what you know and care about.
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I love the way Damon Lindelof writes. It's almost like he was channeling me and he had my voice, even though the territory that those lines cover is unpredictable, and goes from raw emotion to laugh out loud funny but always true.
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I was just writing songs because, if a song shows up, you've gotta write it. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't have any faith in my voice.
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The music I really like to get off on is the old rhythm 'n' blues and rock 'n' roll stuff... that's what I really dig. And I also dig to sing ballads as well. And I also dig writing my own songs. I was just trying to find a way of integrating the whole thing, taking a look at the total picture.
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Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.
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It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.
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Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.
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I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
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I never outline my novels before I write. I do have a vague sense of beginning, middle, and end at the outset of each book, but for me, writing has always been a very character-driven process.
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No one should ever have to read a sentence twice because of the way it is put together.
