Writing Quotes
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The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.
Sean Penn
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When I started writing, I said, 'I don't know how to do this. I don't know if it sounds good.' Coming from being an underdog or being told that something wasn't for you over and over repeatedly, it took a lot out of me. It took a lot of my self-confidence.
Khalid
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But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
Russell Banks
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In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.
Etgar Keret
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When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.
Nico Muhly
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I can sit and dissect for hours, and then write 50 songs about. I always find that inspiring.
Rachael Yamagata
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When I write in the studio, I tend to gravitate toward the ability to play really loud, aggressive, post-punk stuff, with big, heavy guitars and a big rock drum sound.
Tom DeLonge
Blink-182
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I was always worried about the dishonesty and meretriciousness that often accompanies ego. So I tried to make the memoir as factual and accurate and as unemotional as I could, and let readers make their own judgments on what happened. And, in fact, that's how I write poetry. I'm trying to present the reader with the experience itself, not with my commentary on it. So I adopted a style that I'd hoped would let me accomplish that.
Dan Burt
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Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
Mona Simpson
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Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.
Paul Auster
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If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.
Val Kilmer
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I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
Alice Mattison
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The Internet is a tool, a technology, and we like to say that it has all of these properties, but really, it's just a place where our writing is.
Joshua Cohen
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If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
Sarah Vowell
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But I think writing should be a bit of a struggle. We're not writing things that are going to change the world in big ways. We're writing things that might make people think about people a little bit, but we're not that important. I think a lot of writers think we are incredibly important. I don't feel like that about my fiction. I feel like it's quite a selfish thing at heart. I want to tell a story. I want someone to listen to me. And I love that, but I don't think I deserve the moon on a stick because I do that.
Evie Wyld
