Writing Quotes
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Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.
Erica Jong
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Those who say they would write a book if only they had time will never become authors.
Catherine Cookson
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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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The Internet is a tool, a technology, and we like to say that it has all of these properties, but really, it's just a place where our writing is.
Joshua Cohen
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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
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Acting and writing are the things I like doing. I don't like presenting that much.
Ben Miller
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I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.
Stephen Fry
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That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.
Sandra Cisneros
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I wish writing was a talent that I had. I've tried. Unfortunately, I'm just not talented in the writing department. But, if I was, I would just write complicated roles for women because there's a lack of them.
Eva Mendes
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The writing process was some of the most exciting and rewarding moments of my life. It felt a lot like being in a band.
Ethan Hawke
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I'm not the kind of guy who walks around with a notebook writing lyrics. For me, melody and song structure come first and foremost. Unless the melody gets stuck in my head, I'll move on. Once I have the musical idea pretty firm, I just try to write words that are incredibly honest and relate to my life on that given night. I'll sit with the music on my headphones and pen and paper all night long until it's done.
Cary Brothers
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The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.
Henry Louis Gates
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Anyone who can only write about themselves or their life experiences, in my mind, isn't a very good writer.
Robert Rodriguez
Chingon
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How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
Ray Bradbury
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It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, "Listen to me."
Jhumpa Lahiri
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The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.
Nancy Etchemendy
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For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.
Sara Sheridan
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About Swami Vivekanada: I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism... But it was tremendous - something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings.
Chittaranjan Das
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I spend months, sometimes years, doing what I call dreamtime, weaving it together inside my head. But when I actually feel that the egg of my story is ready to hatch, then I can write it in three months. Then I know the landscape and the people well and from the inside, but I don't necessarily know where the story is going to take us.
Michael Morpurgo
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Sometimes I'll have an end in mind, but it's always false, always corny, just a dumb idea anyone could have, sitting on a barstool. An abstract thesis with no real life inside it. And then I start writing and the writing itself confounds me, taking away the comfort of knowing the end in advance. How is that even possible? Doesn't the conclusion come at the end? How can you begin with one - that seems odd, right?
Charles D'Ambrosio
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I'm currently writing a screenplay that I haven't started yet.
Serena Williams
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For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
Lois McMaster