Writing Quotes
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I was writing short films and I was going through this really, really, really terrible end of a relationship that I didn't want to be going through. It was too much for me to process and all of a sudden I had this idea for my first feature film and I knew right away I had to start writing it.
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It's pretty much rock-'n'-roll. I sit down and start feeling stuff and writing.
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There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It’s always heartbreaking.
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It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
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Sometimes when I am writing, I am aware of a rhythm, a dance, a fury, which is as yet empty of words.
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When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
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It would appear that I just love writing many different stories.
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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.
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The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y.
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You can't expect someone who has been in prison his whole entire life to turn around and become a sweet guy who writes books and walks his dog and has a normal life.
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My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.
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I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.
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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.
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Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
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I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.
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Writing is an outward expression of instinctive insight that must be summoned from the vastly deep of our mysterious selves. Therefore, it cannot be taught; indeed, it cannot even be summoned; it can only be permitted.
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
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There will never be another now - I'll make the most of today. There will never be another me - I'll make the most of myself.
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That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.
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Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.
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I remember a point in writing the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."
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There have been times when I've written something and it goes out and it comes back in a letter from some kid as to what they think about it and I've taken their analysis to heart so much that I have taken up his thing. Writing what my audience is telling me to write.
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Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.
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Singing was probably my first love, and song writing. I write a lot of love songs and heartbreaking songs.
