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Writing Quotes
"The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book I assure you."
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"Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience."
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"Writers live in the world to write the sacred words."
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"Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager-and even when you're older-lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer."
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"Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream."
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"On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king."
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"Narrative writing represents a personal attempt to quantify and understand the psychological singularities behind the author's personality traits as delineated by winnowed list of formative life experiences."
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"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?"
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"Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice."
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"But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration."
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"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."
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"A writer needs a partner who can act as fuel to his artistic mind, yet has the great ability to sober him up and help him be in sync with the non-artistic part of his soul."
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"The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."
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"Writing is an incurable psychological disease which only gets worse with writing."
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"Write at a pace that doesn't surpass your creative flow. Don't be hasty; don't be sloppy. Don't forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you'll find that it is harder to make bad writing good than to make good writing better."
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"Parfois, écrire se rapproche de la chute libre : vos doigts s'agitent sur le clavier comme vos jambes dans le vide."
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"Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up."
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"The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure."
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"When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish."
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"The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more."
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"I'm much more than a writer " I'm someone who puts different words together in an interesting way."
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"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."
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"The communication function of modern writers is akin to the ancient role fulfilled by tribal shamans. All writers ultimately perform a shamanistic role in society, their mythmaking voices speak to us from the underworld after their passage to the other side. Writers place themselves in a trance-like state where their unconscious mind dictates to them what to write."
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"The best stories are like the best burgers: big, juicy, and messy."
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"A writer's pen depreciates with every word that it writes. Whereas she appreciates with every word that she writes."
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"Good writing is a mirror of the mind where readers can see themselves again and again."
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"Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach."
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"A true piece of writing sets you free."
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"Cath wanted to go back and rewrite every scene she'd ever written about Baz or Simon's chests. She'd written them flat and sharp and hard. Levi was all soft motion and breath, curves and warm hollows. Levi's chest was a living thing."
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"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander."
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"Paper is more patient than man."
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"I found the best thingI could dowas just to type awayat my own workand let the dyingdieas they always have."
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"Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer's is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times."
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"Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched."
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"You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer."
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"If I can write, who possibly can't. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing."
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"Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind."
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"Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper."
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"I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show."
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