Writing Quotes
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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.
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This is a landmark work in the history of African American studies and American intellectual history. Writing with verve, Jackson brings to life a large cast of characters and traces an ongoing conversation among the writers and critics of this period. This book is likely to become a model for a new generation of scholars, both for the breadth of its engagement and the depth of its archival research.
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One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including or perhaps especially the failures.
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Learning is not the consequence of teaching or writing, but rather of thinking...so a playful, provocative, unclear but stimulating book could actually be more worth your money than a serious, clear book that tells you what to think but doesn't make you think.
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The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
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The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.
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I write anywhere. I'm always banging around on the dashboard. Whatever I'm doing. I can make music out of anything. Whenever a song hits me, I'll pick some sort of melody or rhythm out on it, and kind of enhance the song.
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I'm felt I was writing about love and desire and community and belonging and grief and a whole host of other issues. But race is never far from the surface.
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I really think it's just the people you put around you. For instance, you mentioned "Kiss Goodbye," that was a song that was brought to me by Dan Couch and Dale Oliver. They had already started writing it without. They had put together this whole demo of music with no lyrics.
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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.
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Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
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When I'm writing something and I'm really into it, that's all I can think about, and it becomes the most important thing in the world to me, and it may not be that, in reality.
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It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.
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Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there'll be no "charge" left. You can't father children that way.
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For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.
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The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
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It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
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So many of my relatives didn't get a chance to go to school, and my own Daddy couldn't read or write.
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Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.
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I'm really grateful that I could write. But I don't even mind it going on around me.
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I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.
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There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.
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Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.
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I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
