Writing Quotes
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By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.
Chang-Rae Lee
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In order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.
Hirokazu Kore-eda
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Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
Rudolf Arnheim
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You never write down to the people - you write the best you can with the hope that someone else will feel the same way.
William Kraft
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Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.
Erica Jong
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I don’t like writing for comedians. I like writing for actors. The best comedians are the best actors.
Neil Simon
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I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human.
Etgar Keret
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I'm never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape - ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.
Geoff Dyer
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So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well- but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest.
Celine Buckens
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I always felt that my way into comedy would be through my writing rather than my acting.
Simon Bird
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The thing that I hate is that Nicholas Kristof style of writing where it's like, "I saw the poor, they made me so sad. What can I do about sadness? I am so brave." It's just like, shut up, man, shut up.
Molly Crabapple
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I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.
Wes Anderson
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It's a complex thing when you're writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious. I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance - and I come by this naturally, or I think I do - I am a very good judge of character.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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The information that was contained in a cathedral was based upon a common culture - a common Christian culture - and the elements were chosen for a common symbolic meaning. Someone who knew everything that was represented in a cathedral had a sort of encyclopedia - you can indeed call it that - but it was a selective encyclopedia, like encyclopedias back when they were books and the people writing them were supposed to be specialists in their field. I think today the problem is that people don't know how to choose between different kinds of information.
Eugene Green
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Trying to get my music performed live by bar bands was a self defeating experience. It really just distracted me from what I should've been doing all along, writing and recording.
Tom Scholz
Boston
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In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can't notate that. You can't notate the sound of "St. Elmo's Fire." There's no way of writing that down. That's because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture; if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing - you're talking about 28,000 variables.
Brian Eno
Roxy Music
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I feel I have to work hard to nurture whatever talent I have as an actor. I feel like it's not natural to me. So I don't take it for granted... What I think is my natural ability - which is writing - I think I totally take that for granted.
David Duchovny
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We should write an elegy for every day that has slipped through our lives unnoticed and unappreciated. Better still, we should write a song of thanksgiving for all the days that remain-now that we know how to cherish them.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
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My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it.
Kate Zambreno
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I've been approached many times to write all sorts of books about my past and my personal life. I get interest from people who want to do reality shows, and somebody just offered me a huge amount of money to write my spiritual memoirs. I'm just not interested.
Steven Siro Vai
Alcatrazz
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We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing.
Richard Feynman
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I started writing music in a French way: more focused on lyrics than melody.
Benjamin Clementine
