Writing Quotes
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Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.
Charlotte Erickson
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For me, writing started as pleasure that became professionalized, so my relationship to it is a bit sullied. I'm working it out.
Katrina Onstad
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I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together.
Rich Mullins
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I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
Stephen Fry
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Medicine has an immediate impact, the ability to do good. Writing is such a solitary activity.
Uzodinma Iweala
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The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come.
Naomi Novik
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I think comedy is the hardest actual form of writing there is.
Michael Hirst
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To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.
Conor Oberst
Bright Eyes
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The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
Paul de Man
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There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.
Ryan Adams
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Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
Ray Bradbury
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I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work. I think this is very true of English writers, but perhaps not so true of French writers, who seem to read each other passionately, extensively, and endlessly, and who then talk about it to each other - which is splendid.
William Golding
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We ought not to confine ourselves either to writing or to reading; the one, continuous writing, will cast a gloom over our strength, and exhaust it; the other will make our strength flabby and watery. It is better to have recourse to them alternately, and to blend one with the other, so that the fruits of one's reading may be reduced to concrete form by the pen.
Seneca the Younger
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I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.
Molly Ringwald
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I don't really have a set-in-stone process or formula. Sometimes the melody is there and I have to chase down the lyrics. Sometimes, the song is there and I have to make the melody fit. What I've learned so far about songwriting is that I can't force a song. If I try to do that, it's hollow, and people know a hollow song when they hear it. It's the song they stop listening to and forget about. I'd prefer not to write those kinds of songs.
Kasey Anderson
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I feel that if you made your writing too contrived to meet the market, it wouldn't be any good.
Cathy Marie Buchanan
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Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.
Walter Darby Bannard
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You sit down in the morning on your own to write something. You get to the end of the day and it's not like you've cracked it and it's finished and it's done, because it can always be improved. It can always be changed. There is no right answer, so you can drive yourself crazy with just the expanse of infinite possibilities when it comes to writing.
Dan Mazer
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If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?
Carole Maso
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I write most of my stuff. When I'm rejected in music, it hurts worse than when I don't get a role, because that's someone else's vision. If they don't see me as that part, even if I believe I'm the perfect person for it, that's their vision. The music is my vision.
Taryn Manning
Boomkat
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The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.
Mem Fox
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We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.
Chang-Rae Lee