Writing Quotes
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A thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
Carolyn Forche
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I was in my 20s when I started writing my goals down, assigning each a date that I would achieve them by. I was amazed when I started reaching these goals by the date I had listed on them. It was a daily visualization exercise, and it almost always works.
Lewis Howes
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It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez
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I don't listen to music when I'm writing, but I often do when I'm reworking, editing or when I need to relax.
Joanne Harris
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I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.
Kate Zambreno
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I refuse to censor myself and kids will find their own way to my books and to all of the books that matter to them. As I write more honestly more kids will make their way toward me. And in subverting their repressive parents kids will learn the value of subverting the repressive nature of all authority figures.
Sherman Alexie
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One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.
Daniil Kharms
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My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn't want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, "Don't be sexist!" because that's not how I talk in regular life.
Boots Riley
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The Public Theater requires one to be very public, and writing requires one to be very private.
George C. Wolfe
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If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.
Colson Whitehead
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When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.
George R. R. Martin
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Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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For me, a lot of Discipline was very personal writing, like writing through and working out being inside this gendered body and also the compulsions of the body, the muting of the mind as driven by the body. My father had died some years ago so he haunts the book too, just floats through it ghost-like. But, the writing of every book is different for me. They are so like living creatures, these books, so I don't know what's carried over into the writing of the next things - except maybe that I'm best when I make my writing practice a routine.
Dawn Lundy Martin
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One of the things I enjoy most about writing historical romance is researching inspiring backgrounds and settings.
Nicola Cornick
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For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia Woolf
