Writing Quotes
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Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.
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The idea of me writing something that I'd get to be in as well was not what I saw coming. I do think that life works that way. When you kind of let go of something and accept that it hasn't worked, it takes all the pressure off, and then you end up getting it.
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There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.
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I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.
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Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since.
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Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
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I don't sit down with a goal of writing. I read books or magazines. I watch TV. I go to the doctor. I get on airplanes. I live a normal life and sometimes I'll notice something or read things or experience things.
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Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.
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I started writing music in a French way: more focused on lyrics than melody.
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I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it's only once the play's out that the pain is gone.
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The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.
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What I do is give Ennio Morricone suggestions and describe to him my characters, and then, quite often, he'll possibly write five themes for one character. And five themes for another. And then I'll take one piece of one of them and put it with a piece of another one for that character or take another theme from another character and move it into this character.... And when I have my characters finally dressed, then he composes.
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Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.
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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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There's this stress that is relieved when you realize somebody understands, and that's only going to happen if you feel the person who's writing the book or the people in the TV show aren't holding back.
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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.
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It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.
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Especially in the last 10 years, the writing on animated shows has jumped by leaps and bounds.
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I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.
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I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.
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I cut my teeth as a journalist writing about societies that didn't have democracy.
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Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words.
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For me, if the writing and - by extension - the subject matter and the characters are all good, it doesn't matter if it's film or TV. Each medium has great things going for it.
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
