Writing Quotes
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There's a great temptation to throw things in, as you put it, that you think are neat, or that you have a very clear, specific memory of and think you could do a good job writing about. What I find is that it's like a seed you plant. You can try it, and if it will grow and connect with other ideas in the book, and you can see connections that you can actually realize on the page, then you're allowed to leave it in. But if it just kind of lies there and doesn't really add up to anything or there's no chemistry with everything else going on in the book, then you have to take it out.
Rebecca Stead
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There are two things John and I always do when we're going to sit down and write a song. First of all we sit down. Then we think about writing a song.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney and Wings
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All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.
Linda Sue Park
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Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
Claire Tomalin
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No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
William Butler Yeats
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I do love translating; it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.
Nancy Mitford
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As a writer of worship songs, I have a hunger to write deep songs of passionate reverence to God. Yet I'm aware I cannot sing before I have seen. All worship is a response to a revelation--it's only as we breathe in more of the wonders of God that we can breathe out a fuller response to Him....the key to a life of passionate and powerful worship comes from seeing God.
Matt Redman
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Most of us live for the critic, and he lives on us. He doesn't sacrifice himself. He gets so much a line for writing a criticism. If the birds should read the newspapers, they would all take to changing their notes. The parrots would exchange with the nightingales, and what a farce it would be!
William Morris Hunt
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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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I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is.
Nicholas Mosley
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There's this message to comedians in particular, that you shouldn't write it, and a television writer should write it. And that's a prevailing conventional wisdom that I think is really wrong. That's not to say that television writers aren't great, but I think that the belief that some comedy writer's going to be able to capture your voice is naive.
Jim Gaffigan
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I like to stay artistic. So I always like to draw or write.
Ryan Guzman
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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.
John Grant
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It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
Vita Sackville-West
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In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.
William Stanley Jevons
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Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
C. V. Wedgwood
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I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood.
Michael Pena
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Writing is always a solitary experience, but living, if you're lucky, is not.
Beth Harbison
