Writing Quotes
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Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
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I use three main tools in writing: instinct, hard work and dumb luck. Dumb luck is missing a train and, while you wait for the next one, writing a key word, line or verse. When this happens often enough you begin to believe in Fate.
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I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
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I don't really need to appeal to some stockbroker, and I always sort of root for the underdog. I probably consider all that when I'm writing, but it's not in the forefront of my brain.
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I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.
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Fiction and screenwriting blend for me. I feel like being a TV writer/screenwriter has definitely made my fiction writing better, although I have less time to do it.
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My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.
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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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Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter.
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The biggest problem is that people want to tell the whole story, and they write letters that are way longer than anything I could possibly run.
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I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.
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I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing, and business, and playing the piano and so on.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
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My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.
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I'm always terrified when I'm writing.
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I knew I loved writing, and I was raised by people who love books.
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I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.
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I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.
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I believe it is important that we Japanese write a constitution for ourselves that would reflect the shape of the country we consider desirable in the 21st century.
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If you had told me twenty years ago that I would write a novel set in Russia, much less two, I simply wouldn't have believed you. I had no familiarity with Russia or its history, but part of what drives me as a reader, and more and more as a writer, is curiosity, the desire to explore unfamiliar terrain and inhabit alternate lives.
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I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.
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I started writing rather late in the game. I was fascinated about the story about how Bob Dylan, for 'Nashville Skyline,' wrote between takes. So I'd try to sing new songs off the top of my head. I had rather less than spectacular success on that. But a lot of my songs were done that way.
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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
