Writing Quotes
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I never know the endings when I write. It's a turnoff when you know the ending. You lose much of your incentive to write when you already know. It's like seeing a movie a second time.
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Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.
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If you don't know it, don't write it.
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Everything characters say or do is a clue to their personalities, their histories, and the forces that motivate them.
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I began my writing career in a very isolated place and time.
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To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
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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.
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For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.
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My husband is a director, and I understand what it takes to direct. It's a skill set where you have to be able to talk to actors and understand them, and I don't. It's a very different way of being in the world, and I much prefer writing and producing.
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I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.
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I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
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I'm always writing new songs and doing them live, and I may do it for a week or two, and then never do it again.
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My aunt could never understand how writing could be a full-time job. She'd keep asking when I'd get a real job!.
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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.
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I started writing as soon as I started reading.
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We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.
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I felt that there's an obligation when writing a piece about an urban expressway made in the 50s to acknowledge the context, and Robert Moses is sort of an iconic figure in New York, and he influenced the shape of the city more than anyone else before or after him. He was one of the most powerful and influential civic architects in the world, because of how much he transformed the city. He built multiple bridges and highways and parks and recreational spaces, beaches - in the course of a few decades, he completely changed the city
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I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready.
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For me, songwriting is something that I have to do ritually. I don't just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day.
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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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My female writers have always been my backbone. I had a writing room of six women for five years so I know what women do. Cultivated by me, by the way!
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I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.
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The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
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Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.