"No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you."

Writing, Fraud, Sound

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"No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you."

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"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

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"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."

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"A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can."

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"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."

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"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."

Sylvia Plath, American Poet

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"Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea."

Terry Pratchett, English Author

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"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."

A. D. Posey, American Poet

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"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."

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"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."

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"One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane."

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Explore more quotes by Philip Levine

"I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home."

Home

"I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves."

Identity

"If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem."

Voice

"My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote."

Sense

"I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity."

Time

"My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist."

Writing

"The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry."

Poetry

"Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home."

Home

"I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change."

Change

"I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet."

Family