Writing Quotes
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The act of writing, through its peculiar alchemy whereby the fruits of the mind are transformed into symbols intelligible to all literate minds—this is the greatest magic, perhaps.
Alexander C. Irvine
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Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.
William Allen White
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We’re kissing again, bathed in the light of the streetlamp overhead and the constellations we have yet to name below us. We’re writing our own script. And the light we’re going to build together will drown out every million-year-old star that insists we cannot be.
Courtney Milan
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Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.
Erin Gruwell
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The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.
Russell Banks
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I remember writing ‘All I Want Is You' and hoping it would get me out of trouble. I haven't stopped writing songs or getting into trouble since.
Cheyenne Kimball
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Writing a poem is making music with words and space.
Arnold Adoff
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Writing is a form of mischief.
Stephen Sondheim
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I'm pretty fortunate that I'm in the films I'm in largely because the directors have asked me to be in them. I'd love to do more of them, but the writing and historical stuff I'll probably always do.
Ricky Jay
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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.
Caryl Rivers
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It’s amazing how quickly something gets written. Now, when it comes, it can be on a bus, or in a store. I’ve stopped in Macy’s and written on a dry-goods counter and then suddenly had a whole piece of writing for myself that was accomplished, where earlier in my life I felt I had to spend a week in a house somewhere in the country in order to get that. Conditions change.
William Goyen
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What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
Nadine Gordimer
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Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
William Zinsser
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I like writing songs - I keep saying that one day I'll do something with them, but I haven't yet.
Tom Conti
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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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The preservation of the Jew was certainly not casual. He has endured through the power of a certain ideal, based on the recognition of a Higher Power in human affairs. Time after time in his history, moreover, he has been saved from disaster in a manner, which cannot be described excepting as 'providential.' The author has deliberately attempted to write this book in a secular spirit; he does not think that his readers can fail to see in it, on every page, a higher immanence
Cecil Roth
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I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.
Nicola Cornick
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When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.
Jill Soloway