Writing Quotes
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Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.
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The best user experiences are enchanting. They help the user enter an alternate reality, whether it's the world of making music, writing, sharing photos, coding, or managing a project.
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With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.
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I'm actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I've actually experienced, and I don't think that's very common.
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Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'
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The fact that my students could be in a little college in a little college town on the coast of Rhode Island, and be connecting in other countries with other people, did open them up and empower them and their sense of being. Whether it affected their writing, it's hard to tell.
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I didn't look at it as a transition so much, because I never intended to have a career as a journalist, writing about people who make movies.
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To write is to inform against others.
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I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.
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Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
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I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
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There are some sentences you cannot see yourself ever writing. 'I heartily endorse the Conservative Party' would be one. 'I look forward to Justin Bieber's new record' would be another.
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I think it's great some hotels provide stationery. Because the first thing I like to do when I get to a hotel room is write a letter. "My dearest Gwendolyn, I arrived by nightfall at the Embassy Suites. It will be a fortnight after my return that this letter shall arrive. Allow me to explain the curious charge at the ledger. It is because I miss thee so much, darling, I accidentally ordered Sorrority Sisters 7."
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I've long come to the conclusion that when people say they can't put a book down, they don't mean they're interested in what's happening next; they mean they are so mesmerised by the writer's voice and the relationship that has been established that they don't want to break that. That's what I feel when I read, and I'm sure now that that's what's going on in the relationship between the reader and the writing.
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When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.
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When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff.
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I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.
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One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
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My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.
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I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.
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If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.
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George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
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The goal is not writing. The goal is being a human being writing.
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I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
