Writing Quotes
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If you really hate me, you should at least have the courtesy to take out a piece of paper and write it down and mail it to me. If you're a worthy nemesis, I want to see your handwriting. I want to see your name and your address, and if you don't have the guts to give me those, then you're not a worthy nemesis.
Kathleen Hanna
Bikini Kill
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As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.
John Gardner
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If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
Ray Bradbury
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To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity.
Cate Marvin
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Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?
Eudora Welty
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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
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Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me. My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.
Stewart Stern
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Writing humor is not something every single person can do.
Celia Rivenbark
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I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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I wanted to write a book that talked about the emotions of children, which is the rainbow. We all have moods. We talk about being blue when we're sad, and being yellow when we're cowards, and when we're mad, we're red.
Dolly Parton
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Writing is hard work; its also the best job Ive ever had.
Raymond E. Feist
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I don't want to blame anybody, but I just want to tell you that the process of writing is antisocial, so on the days that you have something really important to write, go from lying down directly to your notepad or your computer. Do not talk.
Sandra Cisneros
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Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.
Ray Bradbury
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All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
Erica Jong
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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 anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
Ray Bradbury
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Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know".
Wislawa Szymborska
