Writing Quotes
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Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
Eudora Welty -
I write of youth, of love, and have access by these to sing of cleanly wantonness.
Catullus
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I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty -
Writing is not a special language that belongs to a few sensitive souls who have a 'gift for words'. Writing is the logical arrangement of thought. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly---about any subject at all.
William Zinsser -
One of the reasons I'm able to write books and still carry on with other work is that I do my best writing between 5am and midday.
Catherine Mayer -
As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
Virginia Woolf -
Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.
Susan Straight -
Writing is a form of mischief.
Stephen Sondheim
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If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.
Stephen Dunn -
Books work as an art form (and an economic one) because they are primarily the work of an individual.
Seth Godin -
My creative process involves reading books and magazines, writing outside, and moving around a lot. I like to pace around when I'm writing songs.
Judith Hill -
Doing an experiment is not more important than writing.
Edwin Boring -
I don't think comedians make an active decision to be a certain "persona." Comedians write the way they're going to write.
Jim Gaffigan -
If I did not have a de-stresser such as writing novels, I would lose focus at work.
Ravi Subramanian
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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 -
I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
William S. Burroughs -
Writing to you like this makes me feel that you are still alive. It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before—words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It lasts only while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or the pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.
Elizabeth Wein -
This writing wasn't painful. It was like being high.
William McKeen -
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.
Ray Bradbury -
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
Hilary Mantel
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I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write because that tends to be a little forced. Sometimes the funniest ideas just happen in the moment, when you're talking to people, or you notice something.
Tom Green -
It's such a deliberate thing to sit down and write a tweet. You're putting yourself out there in a very deliberate way, and over however many tweets, you start to create a character for yourself.
Michael Ian Black -
What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for The New Republic, I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing fire a journalist.
Nat Hentoff -
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