Writing Quotes
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If you are afraid to write or edit or assemble or disassemble, you are merely a spectator. And you are trapped, trapped by the instructions of those you've chosen to follow. Twenty people in the field and eighty thousand in the stands. The spectators are the ones who paid to watch, but it's the player on the field who are truly alive.
Seth Godin
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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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When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.
Morgan Neville
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You already know when I'm writing, so don't be surprised if it's short and dry, because I'm too hungry to write anything fat.
Frederic Chopin
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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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Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies.
Christopher Darden
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With directing, your day is done. When you hit seven o'clock, it's "Cut." That's what it is. For better or worse, that's what you've got and you have to make that work, and there's something incredibly liberating about that because you can't torture yourself. You have to focus on the moment, and you have to embrace every second and opportunity and maximize that, whereas with writing, there's no imperative there. You just amble along.
Dan Mazer
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You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.
Tony Hillerman
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I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I'm writing on the piano.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
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When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.
David Longstreth
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When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn't feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn't one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not.
Hilary Mantel
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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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With fiction, there’s no reason why everything you write shouldn’t be amazing. Nobody’s stopping you from making up better stuff.
Wells Tower
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Writing is harder than you think. You'll be rejected often. If you do it for money, you'll quit. Love it or don't do it.
Paul S. Kemp
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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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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 stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.
Damian Barr
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I write the songs first and in most cases teach myself the technique second.
Joe Satriani
Chickenfoot
