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 . . .
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But being able to talk to so many patients from so many walks of life gives a tremendous window into people's lives. This is not to say I want to write about individual patients, but I think that after listening to the concerns of people who are so different from me, I can more realistically portray characters who are so different from me. Writing Character Thinking Giving People
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The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.
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It's so easy to get caught up in your own self-doubt when you're writing. It can be so easy to tell yourself, "Who am I kidding?"
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I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.
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I don't feel real confident expressing myself except when I'm writing. I feel kind of scatterbrained. I can see everything from both sides and that makes it hard to reach conclusions. Writing enables me to clarify things.
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Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
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A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this world.
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I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
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While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
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Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.
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Zachary Jernigan can't write a bad story. He couldn't even if he tried. Each and every time I start one of his inventive, carefully crafted, thoughtful and mind-bending tales I know I’m in for a treat. This collection is sci-fi at its intelligent best.
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I could not write about a subject sacred to me because I would be too flippant. Fortunately, there are no subjects sacred to me.
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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.
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I honestly turned to writing because I didn't know what else to do, and because a friend had gently suggested it.
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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.
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I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.
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I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.
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I'm currently writing a screenplay that I haven't started yet.
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Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
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It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.
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The acting background helped a lot when I started writing. I was training for it. In acting class they teach you about the stakes in a scene (and) what motivates characters. When you bring a scene to class - as an actor with your scene partner - you have to do everything. There's no producer, set decorator or anything like that. You and you partner have to do everything and that's kind of like facing the blank page as a writer.
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It really made me nervous to write about it [Holocaust] and to approach it, because I was nervous about how to do it respectfully, and I was also thinking about how I could add something new to something that had already been so explored.
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I had to bring the idea of journalistic distance to writing about myself.