Writing Quotes
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Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!
Tom Lehrer
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It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.
Patti Smith
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Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
Saul Bellow
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Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
William Hazlitt
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Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.
Terry Brooks
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I'd love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television.
Denis Leary
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I always think that the deal, once I do the script, sort of the experience I go through writing, which is everything you can imagine, but I always think it's the one thing I can do when I'm directing is say is that it's all about the actors, that I can say, 'We're all here to serve the actors.'
James L. Brooks
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Why do you have to be out of town to write a postcard? I want a to write a postcard to my neighbor: "I still live near you!" The guy sees me go into my apartment, flips the card over, it's just a picture of me holding a rifle.
Jim Gaffigan
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It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.
Virginia Woolf
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Writing is easy. Just sit down and open a vein.
Red Barber
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You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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We write to find out what we didn’t know we knew. We write to know deeper and truer. We write to connect the dots: a whole new constellation.
Carolyn Coman
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The fact that I am constantly immersed in the act of legal writing and editing has made me a better and more efficient creative writer and editor. In the end, lawyers need to tell compelling stories when they write a brief or other legal argument. A successful lawyer understands that the judge is merely a person who is going to read that brief, which should articulate a compelling reason for the judge to rule in that lawyer's favor. In other words, a legal advocate needs to get the judge to care. That's not dissimilar to what a creative writer does.
Daniel Olivas
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The writing process is very much like being in a dark tunnel, and you don't really know what you will end up with until you have created it.
Emily Haines
Broken Social Scene
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For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Teju Cole
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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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Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear in their heads. Of course, self-talk is thinking, and writing begins with thinking.
Richard Rhodes
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My background is in improv and writing.
Paul Scheer