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Writing Quotes
"I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment."
53
"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words."
52
"People keep asking me ...How to instantly become a better writer? It's simple: Use "power words" and see for yourself."
52
"Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage"."
51
"I'm a crap guitarist and I find it really hard writing on my own."
50
"Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it."
50
"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."
50
"I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing."
50
"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."
50
"I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten."
49
"If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed the deeper they burn."
49
"I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general."
49
"The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?"
49
"My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down."
49
"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."
49
"I'm really proud of the writing on Door to Door, and I think that's the Emmy that meant the most - the writing."
48
"The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent."
48
"If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all."
48
"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."
48
"Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel."
47
"Just after writing those we were called up to defend a new position on the left, where the terrible storming of the bridge over the Antietam took place."
47
"Writers are the most pathetic souls when it comes to expressing their personal feelings. Their personalities are as complex as the characters they have weaved. And in a curious way, without them really knowing it, writers are the sum total of the characters they created in their heads or in their writings. Yes, My Dear Tania; writers are capable of reflecting their characters, even though most of them are determined to be just like your ordinary guy next door."
47
"I have a great book. It's called Stantasyland. Except I don't have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list."
47
"I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen."
47
"When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person."
47
"The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything."
47
"I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer."
46
"In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels."
46
"These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try."
46
"Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders."
46
"Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose."
46
"I don't know why directors sign on to these projects and completely rewrite everything."
46
"Journalism, to me, is just another drug " a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past."
46
"It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all."
46
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