Writing Quotes
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An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance . . .
Stephen Spender
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Never having thought of writing for the guitar, I asked Julian Bream for a chart which would explain what the guitar could do. I managed to write some rather pretty pieces for him, except that the first six notes of the first piece all need to be played on open strings. So when he begins to play the audience will probably think he's tuning the bloody thing up!
William Walton
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Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
Eudora Welty
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I'm also always thinking about the score as a recording, as opposed to a performance that can be recreated in a live environment. Some of what I write could of course be played in a concert hall, but for the needs of a film I don't consider that.
Geoff Zanelli
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I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.
Lisa Lutz
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After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages - he believed that if you crumpled them, you'd be insane in a year.
Clive Owen
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From those who agonize that they may no longer be able to write off their private jet to someone who doesn't feel like making the three mile hike to the well to get water and carry it back, everyone struggles.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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We are all inspired by the incredible stories of handicapped people who write novels with their toes, cancer victims who run marathons for cancer research, bereaved parents who set up memorial funds for their lost children. How much easier is it for most of us to be small heroes simply by taking responsibility for our daily lives and transcending our ordinary obstacles?
Danah Zohar
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That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.
Sandra Cisneros
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Writing from a character is really fun - sometimes you can be more honest through somebody else's perspective.
Willy Mason
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No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats…these are the facts.
Alexander Trocchi
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No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Eudora Welty
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I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.
Mose Allison
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I always thought it would be funny to have the Parents Television Council write an episode of 'Family Guy' and give them full creative control. Then see how good the episode is. That's something we've actually discussed in the writers' room. We haven't proposed it yet, but if somebody from the PTC reads this, it might be worth discussing.
Seth MacFarlane
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Writing a story requires you to understand how the world works, how characters think, how their emotions drive them to do surprising things, and so on. In other words, as a writer, you have to be more than a stylist. You need to learn to become a master of storytelling.
David Farland
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Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.
Wole Soyinka
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Overall, The Population Bomb was probably too optimistic. I was writing about climate change - Anne and I actually wrote the book. We discussed whether or not you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building, and that sort of thing, but we didn't know at the time whether the climate change would be in the direction of heating or cooling. We just didn't know enough about it.
Paul R. Ehrlich
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It's sad when a woman writing fantasy in the United States in the 1970s has less actual feminist cred than Sir Walter Scott.
Judith Tarr
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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 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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When I start to write and record a track, I always think about where it is supposed to take place, what kind of room that is, and what kind of atmosphere it should have. Also how it should be performed, and by what kind of musicians or vocalists. I work in a very theatrically minded sort of way.
Fever Ray
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Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.
Wole Soyinka