Writing Quotes
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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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I've been doing some writing, which I find very cathartic and fun.
Cary Elwes
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We must learn, and we are gradually learning, how to write history with the help of archaeology.
Michael Rostovtzeff
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Ideas are like dreams; they will disappear unless we record them. Write a book, a blog, build a company, anything that makes the ideas real.
Simon Sinek
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I've used pseudonyms for various reasons. In my earliest days I was writing too much, and needed to shift some of the product over to other front men. I've also done it to establish the different tones of the different writings: Stark doesn't write very much like Westlake at all.
Donald E. Westlake
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A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye
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If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.
Michael Arndt
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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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When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
Hilary Mantel
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Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
Rich Cohen
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When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.
Leslie Jones
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I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
Stephen Sondheim
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On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.
Heather O'Neill
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I've always loved writing. It was always what I wanted to do.
David Thewlis
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At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.
Steve Martin
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My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing.
Etel Adnan
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I never imagined I'd write a book.
Simon Sinek
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I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.
Sue Townsend
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I write to tell stories. I believe that there a some professions in the world that will last forever: doctor or a nurse, teacher, builder and a storyteller. I write also to become myself, more so day by day. Writing is a way to shape out visible and invisible, in myself as well as in the world.
Eppu Nuotio
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My life wasn't always smooth sailing. Two members of my family were diagnosed with cancer, so I spent a lot of time in hospitals and giving home care. Several close friends died. I fell in love with the wrong person. And I was working all the time but still sliding into debt. My life wasn't anything like I thought it would be. And then I got in a bad car accident. I walked away, but it was like a splash of cold water. The next day, I started writing Twelve Lives. Sometimes, when you're backed into a corner and have nothing to lose, it's a great place to write from.
Hannah Tinti
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I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.
Chris Pavone
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Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.
Nicholas Sparks
