Writing Quotes
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Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
William Styron
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I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.
Lynn Coady
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When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.
Erin McKeown
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I started writing stories when I was 9 or 10. I wrote my first screenplay-type document when I was 14.
Cary Fukunaga
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I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.
Katherine Paterson
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And then afterwards I worked in advertising for a year which taught me about writing even when you don't want to (laughter) because there's never a moment that you want to write about an Erickson cell phone but you have to. And that's really important you know obviously for the...like if you really want to write, you have to write every day no matter how you feel or you know. And then, yeah, and then I ended up working in TV and then from TV into movies and then directing, so.
Nicholas Stoller
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me, tackling that first novel. Just writing it.
Jesmyn Ward
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I like writing teen characters because they’re vulnerable to the newness of things; and vulnerability makes emotional responses raw, vital and unguarded. Lacking a context of consequences, choices are riskier and stakes higher. Life is lived without a safety net. As an author and reader, I find that a mighty charge to drama.
Allan Stratton
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I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.
Paul Auster
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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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Rian Johnson's 'Looper' is inventive, entertaining, and thought-provoking in every way a movie can be. It is in fact the kind of movie that reminds us why we watch them and make them, a beautifully told story that deserves to be not only remembered, but acknowledged for its writing.
Jason Reitman
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Kitty Kelley's method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as an 'unblinking look' at their subjects - which might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed... the result is a work so bad that Britons cannot realise how fortunate they are in being unable to buy it. The great mistake with this book is not that it has been published in Britain, but that it has actually been published anywhere else.
David Cannadine
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The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.
Jason Mraz
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Use the creative process - singing, writing, art, dance, whatever - to get to know yourself better.
Catie Curtis
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I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.
Laurence Yep
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Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
Annie Ernaux
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If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
Mordecai Richler
