Writing Quotes
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I was interested in all kinds of things, whether it be Avatar, Mad Men, Troy, 300, Battlestar Gallactica, or the poems of Horace and Sappho. I always joke about this to my students, who can't quite wrap their mind around the fact that you can have a Ph.D in classics, but not do that full time. I never wanted to write anything with footnotes for the rest of my life. I always think of what I do as the kind of conversation you'd have with somebody, like a good friend, when you've gone and seen a movie together, and you come home and you start talking about it.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
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Senorita was fun to sing, but I don't really have a favorite. When you write a bunch of songs, they're like your babies. You don't pick favorites.
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I think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
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I'm writing all the books I wish I had when I was a kid.
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One of the things I enjoy most about writing historical romance is researching inspiring backgrounds and settings.
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Writing is writing. It's an abiding, wonderful talent, craft, gift that stays with you your whole life. And you can go in different forms, and you can try them. Look at me: I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it.
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I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone whos busy and has too many children, like my mother.
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Things like guitars and ukuleles, you should never part with it, because there will probably be good, healthy times spent, just playing and writing.
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While medicine creates material for writing, perhaps even more important is that it also creates a psychological and emotional need to write.
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Cameron Crowe is someone who I've admired for so long, and I've been friends with him for many years, and I've wanted to work with him so badly that I just never stopped bothering him about writing a script that would be for a pilot.
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With the 'iCarly' soundtrack, I didn't get to write any of the songs. I just picked songs that meant a lot to me that I really liked.
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It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism. And there's so many expectations involved, too. You're going in to see the latest Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick film, you really have high hopes, and you can't help but find that it's not exactly what you had in your head going in. Until you can watch it again, you can't accept the work for what it intends to be. It takes at least a second viewing.
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Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing. ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject.
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It's nice to dig deeper into people who may look one way but always have a story to tell. I obviously write about that a lot.
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Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.
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I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
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Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
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I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.
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Write your own part. It is the only way I've gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands.
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That has been my outlet and a way to provide for my child - writing songs for myself and for other artists.
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I write a lot of material you've never heard that live inside my sadness. You'll hear a song that lasts six to seven minutes of just beautiful sadness. But I can't just go out on the stage to ask five thousand people to be sad with me for seven straight minutes.
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Most of us live for the critic, and he lives on us. He doesn't sacrifice himself. He gets so much a line for writing a criticism. If the birds should read the newspapers, they would all take to changing their notes. The parrots would exchange with the nightingales, and what a farce it would be!
