Writing Quotes
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Trying to make your own sound is hard. When I was producing for other artists, I could just produce and write songs as a normal songwriter, and almost make them generic. The artists themselves, whoever is singing that song, can put their own twist on it. When it came to my own material, I had to really dig deep, because I was just writing generic stuff. It sounded like everybody else, like Justin Timberlake, like Usher. I never wanted to sound like someone, that's when you know it's not going to work.
Karl Wolf
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I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.
Nick Cave
The Birthday Party
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I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but for me, at least, there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.
Michael Arndt
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I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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I've been writing and collecting songs on the ukulele for at least 10 years, so it was time to clear them out of the apartment building and make room for some new occupants.I need to make room for the bassoon record.
Eddie Vedder
Pearl Jam
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If you're going to write about the river, you've got to get in.
Sandra Cisneros
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O, how I faint when I of you do write, Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, And in the praise thereof spends all his might To make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame.
William Shakespeare
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Writing can be a lonely business. But gradually your characters, or the scenes and peopl from your past, begin to rise up around you, and you find yourself writing your way out of loneliness, writing into your own company.
Barbara Mattes Abercrombie
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I can’t remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep.
Anne Bernays
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Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.
Francine Prose
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You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.
Joan Didion
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Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.
Terrence McNally
