Writing Quotes
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I started writing when I was about thirteen.
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.
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I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
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Good traders trade. Good letter writers write letters.
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A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.
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If the world goes crazy for a lovely fossil, that's fine with me. But if that fossil releases some kind of mysterious brain ray that makes people say crazy things and write lazy articles, a serious swarm of flies ends up in my ointment.
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I wanted to write a book that would leave open many riddles and mysteries, even to me. Of course in some cases I do know the answers, but in many others I don't know and don't want to know.
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My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men.
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I've always sort of felt like what the Shins is, I guess, is a vehicle for my writing.
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Never put off writing until you are better at it.
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Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
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I'm more of a songwriter. I love writing songs. I love writing my songs. It's always been writing for me, and it makes it different when you're writing for yourself.
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Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
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I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.
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We are much better at writing code than haiku.
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I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.
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The writer must hew the phantom rock.
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One [of the two ideas for PROOF] was to write about two sisters who are quarreling over the legacy of something left behind by their father. The other was about someone who knew that her parent had had problems of mental illness [and that] she might be going through the same thing.
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At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.
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Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.
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George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
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Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.
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You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.
