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Writing Quotes
"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild - timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline - a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample - that fear may be intense."
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"The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory."
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"Writing, producing and directing, I must say, is incredibly satisfying and gratifying. I've never been happier."
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"The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader."
7
"It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing."
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"Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides."
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"Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about."
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"But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it."
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"I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative."
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"What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible."
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"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."
7
"The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish."
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"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
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"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
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"Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing."
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"I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels."
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"Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing."
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"Continuity is one of the things I like about New England."
7
"Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits."
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"Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't."
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"If typos are God's way of keeping a writer humble, plot holes certainly keeps one on their knees."
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"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
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"The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they've written, they write some more."
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"Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them."
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"I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will."
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"Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works."
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"I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me."
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"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators."
7
"I didn't raise Todd to be a writer, but he happened to be one anyway."
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"ALWAYS hook a reader. If a detail is unnecessary, it doesn't belong in your work, long or short! Make everything intriguing. If you have to describe a desk, make it awesome."
7
"Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do."
7
"I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal."
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"Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?"
7
"I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary."
7
"I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick."
7
"It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out."
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"I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing."
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"If there's true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it."
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"Character is plot, plot is character."
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