Writing Quotes
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I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
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With writing, timing is everything. Being in the right place at the right time.
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I've got to keep on writing. That's non-negotiable. At the same time, one has to look at the world and recognise that writing is not the only thing to be done - I want to have an effect on the world.
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That to me is the way any good romantic would look at his life: Live it first, then write it down before you go.
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The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.
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In writing and speaking, three is more satisfying than any other number.
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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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If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
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I think women need to hear more encouragement in any field, because I see it - I teach creative writing. And even though it's mostly women in the room, they're not often - or they didn't used to be the ones who went on to publish books. I know this sounds like a tautology, but encouragement is the key.
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No one should ever have to read a sentence twice because of the way it is put together.
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It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.
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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 could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
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It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.
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it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
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Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.
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There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.
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Good traders trade. Good letter writers write letters.
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In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.
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Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.
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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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I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.
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In the deepest hour of the night I confess to myself three things; I would die if I was forbidden to write, forbidden to love, or forbidden to fashion....love each other, and celebrate the art and lifestyle of music.
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You just have to sit down and write the next book. I mean, it's not all uncommon for a writer to get a ton of publicity for one book and then not get as much for the next one. I don't worry about that because I try to worry about the one single part of the job I can control: the writing of the book.
