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Writing Quotes
"My writings are the window of my soul through which you can see me, feel me, and understand me."
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"The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic."
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"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words."
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"I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely."
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"My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist."
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"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."
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"Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it."
18
"I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay."
18
"These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try."
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"I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows."
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"Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research."
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"Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'."
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"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."
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"I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then."
18
"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism."
17
"Whenever I am sent a new book on the lively arts, the first thing I do is look for myself in the index."
17
"I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative."
17
"Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be."
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"A pen that has clocked up a million words, a lifetime's memories, is worth more than the centrepiece in a jeweller's window."
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"I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true."
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"Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it."
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"I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away."
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"Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer."
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"Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated."
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"She would give them order. She would create constellations."
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"In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels."
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"When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it."
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"Tech Jacket shares the same tone as Invincible, but the subject matter is very different. Where Invincible is about perfection, Tech Jacket is about flaws."
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"I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader."
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"I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important."
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