Writing Quotes
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There is no rule on how to write.
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Never having thought of writing for the guitar, I asked Julian Bream for a chart which would explain what the guitar could do. I managed to write some rather pretty pieces for him, except that the first six notes of the first piece all need to be played on open strings. So when he begins to play the audience will probably think he's tuning the bloody thing up!
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I'm pretty fortunate that I'm in the films I'm in largely because the directors have asked me to be in them. I'd love to do more of them, but the writing and historical stuff I'll probably always do.
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The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
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Don’t ever stop writing. This is the way the world will find out who you are.
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Writing is just my first love. And I still have some issues with telling people what to do.
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Writing a film is like giving birth to a baby and then giving it up for adoption.
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When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
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I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
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A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
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I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.
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I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.
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In television writing, even if you're running the writers room, it's a writers room.
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I'm always writing new songs and doing them live, and I may do it for a week or two, and then never do it again.
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I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
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If it were a rainy day, a drunken vigil, a fit of the spleen, a course of physic, sleepy Sunday, an ill run at dice, a long tailor's bill, a beggar's purse, a factious head, a hot sun, costive diet, want of books, and a just contempt for learning - but for these. . .the number of authors and of writing would dwindle away to a degree most woeful to behold.
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The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
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But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade.
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The reason I started writing movies was because I kept getting parts that I just kind of stepped into. I didn't have to do a lot of work and I ended up getting sort of bored.
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You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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I've been very blessed to make a living in stuff I love and am totally passionate about, music and writing. So I'm eager to see what the day will bring, how I will feed that passion.
