Writing Quotes
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I found once you start writing about God it's really fun. It's like a rock singer saying "baby." "Baby, baby, baaayy-by." You start saying "God" on the page and you don't want to stop.
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I think that's what makes [the show] a cut above - the writing of a metaphor, the writing about a fantastical world and bringing it into a real life context that is accessible.
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I think the feeling was that 'Venture Brothers' really has something to sell in terms of a feature. 'Aqua Teen' is an element minute cartoon, and its very subversive and non sequitur and weird. We were writing the one show where we were constantly like, 'God, I wish we had another hour to tell this story.' It seemed like a natural fit.
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I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.
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The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
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For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.
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Writing plays fast and loose with the past.
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Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.
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The most important rules that I ever adopted to help me in achieving my goals were those I learned from a very successful man who taught me to first write down the goal, and then to never leave the site of setting a goal without first taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.
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Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
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Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.
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Writing is very much a playground - an artistic playground. It's the most fun thing I do.
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I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.
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I always love writing about children.
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Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
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I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
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I don't want to be famous or recognizable. I don't want to be critiqued about the way that I look on the Internet... I've been writing pop songs for pop stars for a couple years and see what their lives are like, and that's just not something I want.
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I've always been drawn to the real stuff and the stuff that feels authentic. And so when I'm writing songs, that's what I try to do.
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I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.
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There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.
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It's just lovely to be involved in a movie that does go back to the basics - characters and great writing.
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When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
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I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
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I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.
