Writing Quotes
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I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
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Writing teaches writing.
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There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.
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What you write chooses you.
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Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
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My family is involved and my wife Brenda is a great, great writer. She helps me with the writing of everything and also sings with me. I owe a lot to Brenda.
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Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.
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At one point, I just decided that it might be more creatively rewarding to put my time into writing on stuff that I could really be proud of rather than trying to get a one-episode part on 'Modern Family' or something.
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I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.
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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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After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.
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I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'
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Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
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... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it. For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.
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I do get labeled as a guitar band, but the only reason is that's the instrument I know how to play. The guitar is serving the song I'm writing. But I'm learning how to play keyboard better now so that'll start serving the song as well; it'll be another flavor. I'm not going to switch it up with big, fat drum machine beats and real swoopy synths, but yeah...
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When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear.
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I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations. I like to be awake when no one else is: either just before dawn in the morning or late, late at night. Silence helps.
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Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.
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I'm always terrified when I'm writing.
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My revision methods are chipping things away and moving them around and trying to get things right. I'm also open in my own writing to failure. I want to fail. I want to go to a place where I don't know what I'm doing, where maybe I'm lost. And in that uncertain space, I make decisions, and I know all those decisions are going to change everything else. And at a certain point, you just come to a place of rest. In revising, you reduce your options so that nothing is possible, and you just think, I can't change this anymore because I've already passed that decision point.
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Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
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I'm just writing what I know. I've never been much of a reader of fantasy, and I think you write what you, personally, enjoy reading.
