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Writing Quotes


"She would give them order. She would create constellations."


"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine."


"For a director and a producer to be named on the writing credits is practically unheard of."


"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."


"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."


"A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood."


"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."


"A pen that has clocked up a million words, a lifetime's memories, is worth more than the centrepiece in a jeweller's window."


"Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real."


"After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months."


"But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found."


"In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better."


"Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit."


"I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it."



"I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing."


"Writing with you is the only thing that keeps me alive."


"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."


"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning."


"I'm a third done into a new book but sorry - I have a superstition about talking about it!"


"Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite."


"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."


"The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter."


"I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important."


"Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can't quite keep up with gravity."


"It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step."


"The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology were now validated in light of new and better methods."


"Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor."


"A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream."


"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."


"I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not."


"If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin."


"I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay."


"And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me."


"Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated."


"I think that the justices were totally answering the way that they should. I think that the senators, as best I could tell, for the most part, Democrat and Republican, respected that."


"All the nice things about Suzanne are me. All the things that aren't nice, that was just the writing."
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