Writing Quotes
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I've always known that the best part of writing occurs before you've picked up a pen. When a story exists only in your mind, its potential is infinite; it's only when you start pinning words to paper that it becomes less than perfect. You have to make your choices, set your limits. Start whittling away at the cosmos, and don't stop until you've narrowed it down to a single, ordinary speck of dirt. And in the end, what you've made is not nearly as glorious as what you've thrown away.
Carolyn Parkhurst
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People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it.
Ray Bradbury
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I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
William Gibson
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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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I've written some poetry, but...songs have to be more poetic, and I've really gotten to this non-poetic sort of writing.
Mike Gordon
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The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.
Susanna Moore
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I didn't intend to be writing - the writer's life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.
Sandra Cisneros
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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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Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.
Ray Bradbury
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So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well- but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest.
Celine Buckens
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A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
Jonathan Ames
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All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
Carl L. Becker
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Ezra Pound
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Any topical subject, if it's Hollywood, will be a couple of years later because you've got to write it, produce it and distribute it, so automatically you're never going to be right on the cutting edge of stories.
George Clooney
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I definitely write about things that are universal, that everyone can identify with. You're supposed to write about things you're passionate about and I guess I am a foodie. I do love food and it's kind of like I'm an eccentric observationalist guy. To make it kind of universal, I try a lot of different things. When I first started writing this, I was like, 'No food.' Then, you know, it just always goes there.
Jim Gaffigan
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As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.
Paul Auster
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Freedom to speak and write about public questions is as important to the life of our government as is the heart to the human body. In fact, this privilege is the heart of our government. If that heart be weakened, the result is debilitation; if it be stilled, the result is death.
Hugo Black
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And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
Russell Banks
