Writing Quotes
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Easy reading requires hard writing.
Anthony Trollope
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The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
Marilyn Hacker
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I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.
Kim Edwards
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Wrrite, wrrite, Lapochka, why you don’t wrrite?” and assure me that a horse, even with four legs, stumbles. I found it difficult to explain to her what I was writing. “It’s about Colley Cibber,” I said. “He was an actor, playwright and poet.” “Also poet?” Varya asked suspiciously. “Who he? Pushkin?”
Bel Kaufman
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But poverty, with most who whimper forth
Their long complaints, is self-inflicted woe;
The effect of laziness, or sottish write.
William Cowper
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Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws.
Etgar Keret
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Writing is always a solitary experience, but living, if you're lucky, is not.
Beth Harbison
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I don't tend to redraft, I will try to tidy it up, but basically I feel what I write down first has got the impetus, it may be clumsy, it may be repetitive, but a good editor can take that out. That first writing bit is the best thing you will do.
Gerald Seymour
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In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.
Michael Finkel
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I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.
Rebecca Wells
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I’ll never retire as long as I live—that’s like retiring from life! I’ll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you’re in good health, living is exciting on its own.
Bel Kaufman
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Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.
Helen Keller
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In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.
Yasiin Bey
Black Star
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My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
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By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
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The only thing better than good English writing is - I can't think of anything. You just don't pour it pureed over your potatoes. You savor it as if it were a find chardonnay. What on Earth does it matter if you stop and repeat a phrase, roll it around on your tongue, dart a few lines ahead and then suddenly come back and reread it? If the phrase is good enough, you are supposed to stop and rejoice in it.
William Murchison
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To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.
William Feather
