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Writing Quotes
"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."
38
"I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader."
38
"You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something."
38
"As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after."
38
"Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult."
38
"I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since."
38
"I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth."
38
"Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'."
38
"There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises....If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays."
38
"You can never know enough about your characters."
38
"Writing is always personal in some way but not always in a direct way."
38
"If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels."
37
"She would give them order. She would create constellations."
37
"You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't."
37
"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning."
37
"Write about the desire you dare to dream."
37
"I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I can't really describe writing. It's in my head."
37
"A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme."
37
"The encouragement I got from Campbell was a quick check and praise. Once the Space Beagle was launched on its mission, it seemed natural for it to breed additional thoughts."
37
"Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me."
37
"When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person."
37
"I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can."
37
"We do not write as we want but as we can."
37
"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."
36
"There is no way of writing stories that I haven't done."
36
"Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer."
36
"Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself."
36
"There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily."
36
"I'm honestly as happy writing Superman Adventures as I am writing Wanted."
36
"Every word an author writes causes ripples, like tossing a stone into a pond. And you don't know where they'll go, or who they'll touch, or when they might come back to you. I think everything you do is kind of like that, too."
36
"Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing."
36
"Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school."
36
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