"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."

Writing,

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"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."

Exlpore more Writing quotes

"Writing. Is it a way to be remembered,or a need to become immortal?"

Toba Beta, Indonesian Author

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"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."

Emily Dickinson, American Poet

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"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."

Chloe Thurlow, British Novelist

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"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Author

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"Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

Mark Twain, American Author

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"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."

Stephen King, American Author

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"Scotland consistently produces world-class writers."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

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"Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years."

George Stephen, Canadian Businessman

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"When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person."

Daphne du Maurier, English Novelist

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"Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone."

bell hooks, American Critic

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Explore more quotes by Derek Walcott

"This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo."

Athens

"Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god."

God

"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."

Cities

"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."

Love

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

Language

"The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island."

Biography

"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."

History

"We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past."

Past

"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."

History

"Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven."

Heaven