Writing Quotes
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When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
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How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.
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I enjoy the process of writing. The torment comes in getting my bottom on the chair and in front of the typewriter.
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I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
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I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.
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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.
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I'm really happy that people are starting to hear my band, and we are so happy to be conduits for all this other happiness, and this emotional response. So, I can't be like, "that doesn't matter to me, I'm an artist, I exist apart from that!" But on the other hand, if you buy into that too much, you're setting yourself up... if I start thinking, "well, people at the show really liked one song, maybe I should write more songs like that," then I'm in trouble.
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I swear I have at least one good song idea a day. But if I don't get pen to paper in ten seconds, it's gone forever.
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I see so many bands, that are trying really hard to write for a person that they've never met. I get the idea behind it and the idea of helping people, but I feel you help people more by exposing yourself.
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If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.
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We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what's hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.
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Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.
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Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.
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You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.
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The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
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When the first human began to read and write, he or she set the world upon a new evolution. Similarly, if a few individuals have the strength and the power to walk away from the restrictions of the world and to stand fearlessly beyond it, eventually, in some distant millennium, all mankind will also come to that same liberation.
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Writing is what I do. It's like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn't write, I do like cooking.
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I'm writing for entertainment. I like people to reach the end and feel they got their money's worth.
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The only way to raise the quality of writing in school is to create, share, and celebrate the specific criteria for that quality with everybody on a regular basis.
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It is evident from their writings that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated the separation that we have embraced today. They knew that religious principles provided morality and self-control - the lifeblood for the survival of any self-governing community.
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What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
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Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn't go running, I wouldn't go the next day either. It's not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one's body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn't do that. It's the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn't become disaccustomed.
