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Writing Quotes
"The pleasures of being a novelist are many. But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally within my own creative psyche. I'm like a cat with untold lives, because each new book is my rebirth."
9
"For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists."
9
"The act of writing is a contemplative vision quest, a somber expedition of discovery that requires the writer to subordinate their ego in order to travel in soulful solitude towards a desirable personal haven of rejuvenating enlightenment. Writing for personal growth entails unconditionally surrendering oneself to the struggle of tearing their sense of self apart. It demands the solemn willpower to dissect and analyze the fissures of a self-absorbent soul one layer at a time."
9
"There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale."
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"I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good."
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"The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp."
9
"As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience."
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"I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head."
9
"Is every writer's keyboard a spill magnet?"
9
"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
9
"A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music."
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"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it."
8
"Pour your heart onto the page."
8
"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
8
"Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust."
8
"I suppose I'm most influenced by any good, commercial writer. I learn from everyone."
8
"You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough."
8
"We write, not because we claim to know more than others, but perhaps because we want to know more than others. Writers are explorers."
8
"What is your advice to young writers? "Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes."
8
"People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life."
8
"You say you have nothing to write about? How do you find things to talk about? You can write about those things you like to talk about, that's your area of expertise."
8
"Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki."
8
"We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely."
8
"Write what you believe to be true, don't worry about who agrees or disagrees with you."
8
"Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doin."
8
"I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."
8
"I am an Author a person that plays with words that dance in the minds of others."
8
"What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?"
8
"You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!."
8
"When I write, I see the character inside out, not outside in."
8
"There are more writers who read than readers who write."
8
"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."
8
"A writer tries to express those thoughts, which are inexpressible, with beauty and love."
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"Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing."
8
"I'd be somewhat of a lousy writer if I didn't know what to say."
8
"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly."
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