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Writing Quotes
"Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time."
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"This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet."
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"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
33
"Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there."
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"I write because it's the only thing I love that always loves me back."
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"It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself."
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"It's not about fancy literary prizes. It's not about seeming impenetrable or smart or high fallutin. I'm not trying to impress anyone. I am trying to make you feel a story, that's all."
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"When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen."
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"In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it."
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"No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published."
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"It was Noel Coward whose technique I envied and tried to emulate. I collected all his records and writing."
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"Not only are Christians writing about Jesus, but also Communists, Jews, atheists and agnostics are taking up their pens to paint a portrait of Jesus."
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"As far as arrangements after the basic track is cut, if I'm writing a horn arrangement or playing strings, I might arrange that, plan that out. Other times, I'll just sit and roll tape."
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"I don't know if you've ever tried writing a Doctor Who story, but it's a lot more difficult than it initially appears, especially if you've got more than one assistant."
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"The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you."
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"What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible."
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"Well, I just wanted to be a person. I just wanted them to keep writing me as humanistic as possible."
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"But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless."
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"Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself."
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"I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too."
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"I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences."
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"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."
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"But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve."
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"I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important."
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"I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else."
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"I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me."
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"Sometimes I get worried I'm getting too caught up in the nauseatingly oily smoothness of my own line, when all I'm trying to do is make it as clear as possible."
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"Authors, such as William Zinsser, Steven Pinker, Natalie Goldberg, and Stephen King, who have all written exquisite books on the art and craft of writing, have reminded me that it is the commitment to the craft that matters the most; the longing to get better and the countless hours of work that go into writing and rewriting. To them I am eternally grateful."
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"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."
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"Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing."
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"We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting."
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"If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination."
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