Writing Quotes
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I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.
Bharati Mukherjee
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What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?
Larry Wall
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It gives me great pleasure, a good name. I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.
Meg Rosoff
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All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't see myself as an artist, as a writer. The sort of writing that I do, which is popular fiction, it's work. I have contracts to fulfil, and I have deadlines to meet.
Fiona McIntosh
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It's always amazing seeing the song-writing process. A song just starts off as just an idea or a story you want to tell. It keeps building and building when you add the lyrics, the instruments, the vocals until you finally reach the finished song other people can enjoy.
Manika
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Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.
Abbas Kiarostami
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In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?
Gao Xingjian
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I had never written anything. And I had never studied writing. So my motives were pure: I had a great story... a courtroom drama that I sort of fictionalized, and that became 'A Time to Kill.'
John Grisham
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I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.
Jennifer Haigh
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I'm quite glad I never learned to play the guitar, because I think I'd write songs that were more classically structured. As it is, I've had to create my own way of writing, which isn't typical. Everything's a big crescendo.
Florence Welch
Florence and the Machine
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Jorge Luis Borges had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
Sandra Cisneros
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Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
Meg Cabot
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You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.
Barry Mann
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When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
Pearl Cleage
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I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
Bill Bryson
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Writers don't write writing, they write reading. When I was a kid, I read four or five books a week. And that is how I became a writer.
Avi
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I was so sure I wanted to be a novelist. I would spend hours and hours every day writing. Little stories about nothing in particular. I recall one about someone with an illness. But my dedication wasn't really healthy, and it reached the point where I wasn't sleeping. My mum would tell me, 'You need to go outside to get some fresh air.'
Samantha Shannon
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'Seize the Story' takes readers all the way through the process of writing fiction, from beginning to end. Every element, from dialogue to setting, plotting to character creation, is laid out and illustrated with examples. But the tone of the book is not that of a dry writing manual - it's definitely written for teenagers.
Victoria Hanley
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Generally, if you preface an interview request with, 'I'm an author writing a book,' for some reason, that seems to open a lot of doors.
James Rollins
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I was a shy child, and when I was 13, I started wearing braces on my teeth. I used to be acutely self-conscious, and I think writing was a way of withdrawing into my own imagination.
Samantha Shannon
