Writing Quotes
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I had been really obsessed with Jonestown for a long time - many years - and had read everything there was to read about it, seen all the footage and the documentaries. I found it really chilling in a personal way - the question of people submitting all their personal power and agency and independent thought it the name of a group or ideology. I could not find a way to write about it directly that didn't feel too heavy.
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When you're writing - when I'm writing anyway - I'm writing out of different kinds of preoccupations and obsessions, different forms of drivenness, and so you're really hostage those while writing. I am, anyway. And it's only when you finally take the finished thing out of the furnace that you see what it was that went into the making of the thing.
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If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code are ALL freaks. They work for capitalist dogs, of course, because we all do, but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me.
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I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.
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Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.
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Well, I'd had the Fat Mattress earlier as a writing outlet for songs and that.
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The Blood of Heroes is surely the best account to date, one that presents plenty of new insights while acting as a corrective-or at least an alternative viewpoint-to previous accounts....Donovan combines that vital blend of authoritative scholarship with the vivid writing necessary to make an oft-told tale seem fresh.
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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
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“Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”
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I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.
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I feel most at home when I am writing a poem—because in that instant, I am everywhere.
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What I've found as I have kept writing stories is that more and more your way is barred. I feel really choked by what I already know how to do, by the fact that my obsessions nearly always mount a sneak attack, so that I find myself writing another version of the same thing.
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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.
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Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
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I've had a long association with the theater over the years but I had never produced a play and it was something that I'd always wanted to do.The movies moved away from dramas, and I think that I'm very excited by the opportunity to take smart writing that takes risks and see it on stage. It's exciting to see that engagement between the audience and the playwright.
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Theatre can entertain, provoke, challenge, investigate, comfort and educate. It's arrogant of a playwright to think education is more important than anything else. Writing for the theatre does not give you permission to lecture, hector or bore.
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What if you began to expect the best from any situation? Isn't it possible that you could write new chapters in your life with happy endings? Suspend your disbelief? Take a leap of faith? After all, what have you got to lose but misery and lack?
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One of the things that made me try writing novels was I could take time off to be with the kids. That's the practical side of what I love about the writing life.
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People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.
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Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
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I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.
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I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
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When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.
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Writing is a form of mischief.
