Writing Quotes
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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.
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Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading.
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There's hundreds of different ways of writing songs.
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All good writing comes out of aloneness.
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I don't think a lot of bands and artists work as hard as we do on the creation, on the writing, the arrangements and the recording in our format.
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When I'm writing obviously I have all the nostalgia in the world, I have all the emotion in the world, but then when I actually perform, I need to just perform it, and that's it. I do retain like a little bit of it because I have to, I sing and perform the songs so I have to - it's a performance of the songs - but I just have to get the right balance.
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I had some experience writing collaboratively when I wrote for the theatre.
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I do love writing. It doesn't come to me as readily as I think acting does. I think acting is in my instincts. Writing is a craft that I work very hard at. And I have to train and continue to develop.
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Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.
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When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.
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I want to be creative in as many different environments as possible, whether it's doing film scores, writing for TV ads or video games - all sorts of stuff, as long as it requires writing music.
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It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.
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Interviewing Rei Kawakubo in Tokyo and John Galliano in Paris, both for 'Pop' magazine, were huge for me, not just in learning about fashion and writing but about how little desire I had to be a critic/reporter/journalist/commentator so much as a kind of travel diarist.
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I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.
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I'm enslaved to writing to the point where I sacrifice almost everything else.
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Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.
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I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.
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It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.
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The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
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...decide for yourself what makes you truly happy and then organize your life around it. Write down your goals and make plans to achieve them.
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
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Philanthropy is not about giving money but about solving problems. While well-meaning, the idea of writing a check and calling it 'philanthropy' is extremely short-sighted and unfortunately, extremely pervasive.
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I've got a few reasons why I've got to maintain stability. I've got into wanting people to hear my music. I've got something I want people to hear because I know they'll like it. They've gotta like it! The songs I've been writing are the sort of things you have to like.
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Yes, I'm writing about motherhood, but I bristle a little bit, especially living with someone whose parenting falls between the cracks of what the culture is ready to recognize as mothering or fathering, but who most certainly is an excellent parent.
