Writing Quotes
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
Alice Mattison
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I think that, like in my writing, reality is always a soap bubble, Silly Putty thing anyway. In the universe people are in, people put their hands through the walls, and it turns out they're living in another century entirely. … I often have the feeling - and it does show up in my books - that this is all just a stage.
Philip K. Dick
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By the end of the writing process, which is about 80 songs per album, I look at the material and think, what's going to make a difference in someone's life.
Jason Mraz
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Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too.
Margaret Mahy
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When you're writing something, and you're putting yourself out there, or you're performing and someone comes in and savages that, then of course it feels personal. It doesn't feel like it's just business, because there's no business - it's not like we're conducting business, this anonymous critic and I. It's just that this person is tearing me a new asshole.
Michael Ian Black
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I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.
Steve Earle
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I was in my 20s when I started writing my goals down, assigning each a date that I would achieve them by. I was amazed when I started reaching these goals by the date I had listed on them. It was a daily visualization exercise, and it almost always works.
Lewis Howes
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It's such a deliberate thing to sit down and write a tweet. You're putting yourself out there in a very deliberate way, and over however many tweets, you start to create a character for yourself.
Michael Ian Black
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When I started writing, I didn't have the common sense to use a pseudonym, so I write under my own name. If I did have a pen name, though, it would be something very historical - something that sounds very sort of Regency... Sophia something.
Nicola Cornick
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My revision methods are chipping things away and moving them around and trying to get things right. I'm also open in my own writing to failure. I want to fail. I want to go to a place where I don't know what I'm doing, where maybe I'm lost. And in that uncertain space, I make decisions, and I know all those decisions are going to change everything else. And at a certain point, you just come to a place of rest. In revising, you reduce your options so that nothing is possible, and you just think, I can't change this anymore because I've already passed that decision point.
David Biespiel
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Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.
Cathleen Schine
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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks
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Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser
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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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The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
Douglas Coupland
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Throughout my life, I have held the strongest belief that if you write down what you want to accomplish in your life: your dreams, goals, hopes and aspirations, you are much more likely to achieve them. I have been writing down my goals since I was a kid, and I've had more success than I could have ever dreamed of... one goal at a time.
Scott Cohen