Writing Quotes
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All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.
William Gibson
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I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do.
Emily Barton
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The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry
The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy
The books that people talk about we never can recall
And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.
Carolyn Wells
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Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
Susan Orlean
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Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
Eudora Welty
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On a piece of paper, write down the thing that is stressing you, the obstacle that is in your way. Then put it in a box and just leave it there. At the end of about a week, dispose of it - throw it in the trash or bury it - some sort of ritualistic act of releasing it.
Gabrielle Bernstein
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While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
Nicholson Baker
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My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.
Thomas Mallon
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With respect to those points, on which the declaration of Scripture is positive and decisive, as, for instance, in asserting the low antiquity of the human race; the evidence of all facts that have yet been established in Geology coincides with the records of Sacred History and Profane Tradition to confirm the conclusion that the existence of mankind can on no account be supposed to have taken its beginning before that time which is assigned to it in the Mosaic writings.
William Buckland
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I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.
Melissa Rosenberg
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When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
Alice Mattison
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If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.
John Whitney "Whit" Stillman
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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.
Joseph Kanon
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Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.
Chad Harbach
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There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
Erica Jong
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I think it's probably true that creative people are touched by melancholy more than the average person, and to the extent that delving into that shadow world produces good work, I'm all for it. But I think you have to be able to step back from the work, and say, "Look how miserable I felt. Look how beautifully I wrote about it. Now I'm going to get an iced coffee and chat with a friend." Writing should be a way out of despair.
David Starkey
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I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.
Nicholas Royle
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I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.
Ernest Hemingway
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I hope I never have to stop acting. I love it. But, I think the coolest thing about acting is working with these amazing people all the time, and writing represented a new way to meet those people and to tell stories, at the same time, which I've always wanted to do, and to tell jokes. I love comedy, so writing was a way of getting these jokes that I had down on the page.
Josh Lawson
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Mary Daheim writes with wit, wisdom, and a big heart. I love her books.
Carolyn Hart
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I don't feel real confident expressing myself except when I'm writing. I feel kind of scatterbrained. I can see everything from both sides and that makes it hard to reach conclusions. Writing enables me to clarify things.
Conor Oberst
Bright Eyes
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For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go to work. Or, come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.
Ridley Pearson