Writing Quotes
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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.
Mona Simpson
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I don't listen to music for fun. I ain't got enough time for fun! I'm always busy writing my own music. I don't try to compete or see what other people are doing.
Dolly Parton
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Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
William Goldman
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Writing on the road is a passion of mine.
Lee DeWyze
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The writings of latter-day prophets clearly teach that the sorrows and sufferings endured by Adam and Eve upon their leaving the Garden of Eden were ordained by God and were a necessary part of their-and our-earthly experience. President Howard W. Hunter, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, taught: "We came to mortal life to encounter resistance. It was part of the plan for our eternal progress. Without temptation, sickness, pain, and sorrow, there could be no goodness, virtue, appreciation for well-being, or joy."
Daniel K Judd
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Too many poets write poems which are only difficult on the surface, difficult because the dramatic situation is easily misunderstood. It's not difficult to write poems that are misunderstood. A drunk, a three-year-old-they are easily misunderstood. What is difficult is being clear and mysterious at the same time. The dramatic situation needs to be as clear in a poem as it is in a piece of good journalism. The why is part of the mystery, but the who, what, where, and when should all be understood.
Miller Williams
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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 suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.
Ernest Gaines
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From a writing standpoint, maybe television is a little more satisfying because it's not all hinging on one thing. You can experiment, week to week, and you can be a little narrower in your scope one week, and then be a little broader the next week. But with film, everything can look the way you want it to look. You can really sculpt the final product. So from a directorial standpoint, film is more satisfying. But, they're both forms of media that I'd like to keep involvement in.
Seth MacFarlane
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Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.
Virginia Woolf
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There is a huge difference between writing a book, which is a private activity I engage in with myself, and wanting to engage in overly intimate personal conversations with strangers, which I pretty much never want to do.
Michelle Tea
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Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.
Susan Orlean
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I've always loved writing. It was always what I wanted to do.
David Thewlis
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I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.
Ernest Gaines
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I'm as much my own master as anyone can be, without being the master of others. I can write anywhere - all I need is a couple of hours of solitude and a computer, and I can write a chapter. Since my work is portable, I can live anywhere I like.
Stuart Woods
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
Ernest Hemingway
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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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Hollywood does not write parts for people like me, an elderly gentleman, and when they find out you're crippled, forget about it. No, I'll never work again.
Ricardo Montalban
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As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
Virginia Woolf
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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.
David Anthony Durham
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Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.
Erica Jong
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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
