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"Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place."
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"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You never know what you will write until you write it."
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Personal Development
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"I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait."
Writing
"I started trying to write when I was in second or third grade."
Writing
"I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe."
Love
"The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon."
Books
"It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want."
Writing
"When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me."
Being
"Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it."
Writing
"Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place."
Writing
"There's something about each of my books that I'm really proud of, and there's something about each of my books that I cringe over."
Books
"Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it."
Writing
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