Write Quotes
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Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
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The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over — a century after it is over.
Joyce Kilmer
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I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.
Nick Flynn
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Ultimately, we as a band just write what we write. Some of it's very serious, and even in the serious songs, there's sometimes an angle of levity. I think that's just how we communicate naturally and to shy away from that would be, first of all, boring for me, but also it wouldn't ring true to who I am or the way I relate to people or the way we relate to people as a band or the way we relate to the audience. Humor is a big part of it, but we also take our craft very seriously.
Ed Robertson
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You write a thing down because you're hoping to get a hold on it.
Sigrid Nunez
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If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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I never had any master plan about directing, and I don't really write.
Steve Buscemi
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I have a really, really difficult time with dramaturgy sometimes in America, because I write about other cultures. I write about a culture that is very difficult, it is very foreign to a North American. A lot of people don't know about what's happening.
Nilo Cruz
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I found it incredibly challenging to write clear prose that had the dynamism that I wanted.
Alex Lemon
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It's difficult to write anything at the moment, as every week there's a seismic shift in world events.
Stewart Lee
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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
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I never took any writing classes or planned to write. But I was working as an advertising copywriter in the late '80s and thought, 'What a shame there has never been a decent book on Jean Harlow,' then thought, 'Why don't I write one myself?' being kind of an idiot and not having the slightest idea what I was getting myself into.
Eve Golden
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To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
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There's still plenty of lead in this pencil, but I only write to one person now.
Rod Stewart
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There are skills you pick up on in a clinical environment in terms of how to ask questions, what to look for, how to listen that serve one well when trying to write.
Uzodinma Iweala
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There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I want to write something that makes it easy for young people to look right into the abyss.
Dave Mustaine
Metallica
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Anything you write, even if you have to start over, is valuable. I let the story write itself through the characters.
Steve Buscemi
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Greta, Greta, he whispered, eyes shut in rapture, on thy breast I write my Edda, at thy feet I lay the keys of Niflheim, by thy leave alone, I live, and breathe, and die.
Catherynne M. Valente
