Writing Quotes
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I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
John Irving
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Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.
Amor Towles
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Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
Ernest Hemingway
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I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.
David Biespiel
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I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
Nicholson Baker
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Good writing is about finding and exploiting anecdotes that resonate with the reader. In storytelling, it's OK if you only make one point, as long as it's a good one.
Ben Clymer
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I've been interested in the writing/directing thing and really fell into acting by complete accident.
Domhnall Gleeson
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I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.
Kirby Larson
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For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.
Paul Auster
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
Virginia Woolf
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I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).
Katy Lederer
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To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all.
Emily Gould
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The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.
Naomi Novik
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'The Searcher,' as the title suggests, is about someone in search of something, and I have always loved quest stories and so was drawn to writing one myself.
Simon Toyne
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When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
William Monahan
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When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
Virginia Woolf
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I wrote a couple of scripts on spec that didn't get made but got some attention, and I then got offers to write professionally.
Curtis Hanson
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Think it's so unfair when people think that you're not a "real artist" unless you're getting paid for it....I personally know so many poets that work a 9 to 5 in a cubicle and come home and write poetry. Their poetry is just as powerful and moving as anything that I've ever written, if not more.
Sarah Kay