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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."
"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."
"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
"It is the most fun I'm ever going to have. I love to write. I love it. I mean, there's nothing in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I'm so very bad at it. It's the greatest peace when I'm in a scene, and it's just me and the character, that's it, that's where I want to live my life."
"Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write."
"Heinlein's Rules for Writers - Rule One: You Must Write. Rule Two: Finish What Your Start. Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order. Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market. Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold."
"I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write."
"After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."
"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."
"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd."
"To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man."
"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't-whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee."
"Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward."
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