Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Writing Quotes from famous persons: Dimebag Darrell, Chris Kyle, Jim Davis, MacKenzie Scott, Steve Harvey. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Writing Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.
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I ain’t no author, man… my writing skills are not of ‘New York Times‘ best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain’t. My vocabulary ain’t.
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I am a better person when I am writing, and I am probably a better mother because I can focus all that laser attention on these characters rather than worrying about my kids.
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Keeping your head down and just writing is only part of the equation, so I surround myself with smart people to help sell my books.
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There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.
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School is something that you learn – reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.
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It is very tough to make a short film. It’s like writing a short story, which is tougher than writing a novel. You can’t afford to faff around; you can’t indulge. You have to get to the point.
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I never thought it was unusual to write, and I’ve been writing or pretending to write since before I even started school.
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Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It’s like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they’ll crystallize into a pattern.
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I don’t control my writing – it controls me.
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I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.
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I never know, when I start writing a story, what’s going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
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I just kind of transitioned right out of the dance world into the music industry. I started writing and I just fell in love with the whole process.
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Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.
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History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.
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A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.
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I take my laptop everywhere with me, and I will write on long journeys. I will write sitting in my hammock in the middle of the rainforest. When everybody else is chilling out after filming, I am usually writing!
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I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what’s going on in my heart and that’s what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.
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If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you’re writing, ask yourself what’s bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you.
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When I was 13, before I got in high school, I was writing mad raps. I didn’t really know if it was good or not, so for a year, I just held them. When I got in high school, I started spittin’ bars.
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All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
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The Term Paper Artist’ represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.
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There is an honourable tradition in British public life that those charged with authority at the top of an organisation should accept responsibility for what happens in that organisation. I am therefore writing to the prime minister today to tender my resignation as chairman of the BBC.
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I do want to work on writing, because writing’s a skill. Writing is something that you can train yourself to know better. To know yourself better. And it’s intimidating as hell.
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When you’re writing, it’s all up to you, and you don’t have to make any compromises. And when you’re directing, there’s this intense pleasure you get from working with all these really talented people, and pooling the efforts towards a common goal. I like all the aspects of film-making.
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In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
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I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.
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I love food. I’m not a great cook, but I love to cook, and I like how different it is from writing.
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All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
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A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.
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I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.
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Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
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You can catch a scent in the wind – an idea, or a concept – and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can’t when you’re writing a novel.
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Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I’m interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
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Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.
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When I wrote ‘Lean In,’ some people argue that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don’t have a partner. They were right.
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There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best – because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.
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Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
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I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It’s all about editing.
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Transforming a brand into a socially responsible leader doesn’t happen overnight by simply writing new marketing and advertising strategies. It takes effort to identify a vision that your customers will find credible and aligned with their values.
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But me writing sad songs doesn’t mean I am a sad person.
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Writing is a conviction before it is a craft.
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There isn’t much political coloration in my economic writing; it’s not surprising that few people know my political views. They really aren’t very important.
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I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, ‘You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent, and I’m not your mommy; I’m a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?’ and I really, really don’t. I’ll go peaceable-like.
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God is love, but get it in writing.
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I remember reading the book ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad,’ and I remember writing my goals down, and my number one goal in life was just to be a good husband and a good father someday. That was number one, as a 17-year-old kid.
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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
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The storyboard department doesn’t talk to the layout department, which doesn’t talk to the writing department. They’re all jealous of each other.
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If there’s a gene, I got it from my ma. Her writing has this effortless quality.
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There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.
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Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
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I loved ‘Everybody Loves Raymond‘ because I like Ray and I thought it was beautifully cast, I thought it was great writing. I thought Patricia Heaton was wonderful.
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I’ve been writing a lot of sad songs, and I got to the point where I was like, ‘You can’t write another one or you’re lying.’
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For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn’t really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I’m trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.
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I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense… But it’s unquestionably good escapist literature, and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.
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I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population – and gave birth to the whole world. Without them writing and being directors, the rest of us are not going to know the whole story.
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The writing was so clearly written on the wall about me, but I didn’t see it. I had no role models. I didn’t know there was even a possibility of being gay. I battled with it, but this was the way God made me. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the man upstairs.
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I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
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I’ve always wanted to be in journalism. I even started a course at Loughborough doing media studies. I like all sports, and I am keen on writing. But I thought that while I was still young, I ought to make a real go of it at badminton. So I have put all my focus on playing sport instead of writing about it.
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All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.
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You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
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Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.
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I am baffled by good writing.
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My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?
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If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.
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I’m always happy, in every game, every win I keep writing my history, and I hope to do even more from now on.
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Everything can be going well, but if I’m not writing, I’m not happy. When I’m writing well, I’m like a different person.
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While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.
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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.
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As I was writing ‘The Shock Doctrine‘, I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina.
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The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
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I’m very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.
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I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
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At art school, a teacher said: ‘The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.’ I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called ‘Ice Cream and Wafers.’ The next was ‘Holding Back the Years.’
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Of course having a baby derails the writing process for some time. And I will be the first to say that I have essentially no social life, because there’s just nothing left after being a mom, professor, and writer. I used to be big into rock climbing. No more. A lot falls by the wayside.
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My writing was very much like my diary, and I just put it out there to put it out there because I didn’t really know what I was doing. The fact that people related to the songs made me feel less alone in a lot of situations.
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I guess what I’m trying to say is that writing is mysterious; you don’t ever truly know where it is coming from, so don’t edit yourself line by line. Don’t get in your own way. Whatever is truly there at the core, that is your voice.
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If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.
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I’m not in it for the money. I like music. I love to write music. I can’t imagine myself not playing or singing or writing. It would just drive me crazy if I didn’t.
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I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.
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I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it’s disheartening; you don’t want to go on. That’s what I think is hard – the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done.
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Through my writing, I have made new friends and continued to learn about this world of ours in all its wonder, with all its challenges.
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I do not pretend to write much of a letter. You know under what circumstances I am writing.
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It’s been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities – both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.
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When I’m not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I’m not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I’m reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
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The core of my writing is not art but truth.
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Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family’s asleep and I’m alone, I think about the next day’s writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.
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I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.
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I would write down the lyrics to ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ in Korean – not translating it, but phonetically writing out each word. I didn’t know what they were saying, so I would just write everything down as I heard it. I would recite it and imitate it like that. That’s how I started to write my own raps.
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I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.
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The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it’s icy, and I’m in bare feet.
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Writing books is fun because after I do a show for a couple hours, I’m in a bus for 22 hours. It’s not hard for me to look out the window and tell a joke here and there.
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I’ve been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don’t tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
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Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.
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Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I’m writing the manuscript, the characters I’m writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
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The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
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Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
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The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
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It’s always hard for me to put the pieces together when listening to a finished album that I was a part of writing and playing. There are so many memories wrapped up in each note and each song that it’s hard not to constantly flash back to what made that musical event happen while listening.
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Songwriting is just like any other kind of writing – it’s either fiction or nonfiction. You can even get into philosophy and politics, which I’ve done on occasion.
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Even when I am writing I usually take a break around lunchtime and go for a little walk to clear out my head.
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What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don’t have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.
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I really love standup, and I really love writing standup.
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I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
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I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
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I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
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One of my favorites is ‘Parks and Recreation.’ Great show; awesome writing; beautiful, diverse cast. They also have a very diverse writer’s room, which I love.
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To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.
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Years ago, when I was writing westerns, other writers who were friends of mine wanted me to collaborate with them. And it just didn’t work.
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Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. ‘Stiff’ was an oddball book – I mean, a funny book about cadavers? – and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that’s what has made it a success, I think.
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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I have two little children. I didn’t want to be missing their childhood while I was away, busy writing about children.
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I took a few months off after my senior year was over, and I prayed and tried to figure out what was my plan and my purpose. That’s how I started writing songs and playing guitar just to get my feelings out.
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I started writing to reassure myself that I was still all here.
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Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
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Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.
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I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: writing picture books is an art – the art of word choice.
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Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
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In the future, I’d like to continue being honest with myself and admit when I’d be better off asking someone else to illustrate my writing.
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The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called ‘Poetics.’ It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you’re writing, you’ve probably broken one of Aristotle’s rules.
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Some of my writing is very subconscious, and that’s definitely what happened with ‘Body Language‘ – I looped some basic bossa nova sounds and just started singing.
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I’m just writing songs about how I feel or about how people I know feel.
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For myself, I keep writing. I’ve got to do something. I can’t sit on my hands and do nothing.
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Writing by myself in my bedroom is definitely where I feel most creative.
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I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.
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Writing, overall, has never been what I’d call fun. It’s fulfilling. It doesn’t come real easy for me.
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The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
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The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
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I’ve been writing lullabies since the beginning. I kind of did it for myself to help myself fall asleep when I really worried, like when I was homeless and I’d fall asleep in my car.
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Erudition – that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic – is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.
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I don’t want to be famous or recognizable. I don’t want to be critiqued about the way that I look on the Internet… I’ve been writing pop songs for pop stars for a couple years and see what their lives are like, and that’s just not something I want.
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Writing is investigation.
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In the business world, I did fairly well, but wasn’t happy. A bout of sciatica put me flat on my back. All I could do was read, listen to my mother’s stories about the Sandovals, and daydream: a return to self. My writing career had begun.
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I went to USC and got my first break writing for a kids’ show called ‘Pepper Ann.’
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Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
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I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
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When I’m working, I’m pretty busy with that, but when I’m not, yeah, I like to make music. I sing in jazz bars and stuff, and then I mainly paint every day. It’s kind of like a different side of my mind I like to use, and it keeps the other one fresh, and yeah, writing, I’ve been writing with some friends.
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Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.
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I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.
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I’ve always had this interest in sibling relationships because I don’t have any siblings. I’m completely a product of the one-child policy in China, so I always kind of wished that I had an older brother or a younger brother or sister just to have that bond, so I find myself constantly writing about that relationship.
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Our writing, especially during ‘Boxer‘ – the recording process was the writing process, which is not the way I would advise anyone else to do it.
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When you’re writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
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If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
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At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It’s like therapy for me, because it exposes what I’m really thinking.
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‘,Alive’ stems from emotional growth and contentment. Before writing the song, I was swimming in a pool of hurt, guilt and spiritual discomfort. Instead of drowning, I decided to embrace these feelings and express gratitude for the lessons learned. With this new-found sense of life, I am stronger and happier than ever.
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At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn’t know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.
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I am into the candle business, have a home store, The White Window, and interior designing is my primary occupation, though writing now seems to have become better known.
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I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.
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There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
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Kids are smart: don’t underestimate their bull detector. Contemporary kids have access to a lot of information, so don’t even try to fool them. I have never been more nervous about my research than when writing for young adults because they pick up every single error.
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Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That’s how you focus the world. It’s the only reason you should ever try this writing job.
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So when I started writing my own stuff, it was with a lot of combinations and time changes and power.
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The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.
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My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
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I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, ‘A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.’
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I loved writing lyrics for rap when I was in junior high. I loved studying, but somehow I wanted to be a rapper who can write and rap.
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This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
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I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
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I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don’t see someone who looks like their mother.
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The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: ‘The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.
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That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.
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My mind wanders terribly. I’m not wholly annoyed by my daydreaming as it has been immense use to me as regards imaginative thought, but it doesn’t help when it comes to concentration. And writing needs concentration – lots of it.
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The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
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You don’t want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else’s words get inadvertently mixed in with your own. If you do feel the need to paste in a block of research while you’re writing, be sure to highlight the copied text in a different color so you can go back and remove or rewrite it entirely later.
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While writing ‘City Boy,’ I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal.
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Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn’t so good at that.
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The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
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I will direct one day. I need some more life experience before I feel like I can do something like that comfortably. It’d be a feature, it’d be something maybe that I had in writing as well.
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Many are ready, when listening to the inventor, to belittle and deny his achievements so that he will no longer be heard in honourable places, but after some months or a year, they use the inventor’s words in speech or writing or design.
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You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
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I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can’t do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it.
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As far as writing and directing, I’m very focused on the thriller genre.
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Writing music is just like writing a book.
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Being in the public eye is part of what I do, and taking on a multitude of different projects – television, radio, fashion, writing or deep-sea diving – is a blessing. It is also how I pay my bills and fund my own skating, as I don’t have a sponsor or financial help from my federation.
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I don’t have to worry about writing jokes. I just tell stories about things that have happened to me. As long as I’m alive and I’m living and I’m experiencing different things every day, the show will always change.
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People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.
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I’ve had a bit of a crazy life. So writing lyrics in songs is easy for me.
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You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
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The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
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Scientific fraud, plagiarism, and ghost writing are increasingly being reported in the news media, creating the impression that misconduct has become a widespread and omnipresent evil in scientific research.
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Writing itself is a dream. There are days of self doubt and deadlines and wondering how you’re going to pay the bills until you write that bestseller. But it’s still the best job I’ve ever had. I’ve also been able to help a lot of people and even inspire a few and that feels great.
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I don’t listen to anything when I’m writing. I need total quiet, which is astounding, given that I spent years working for a newspaper and having to write features surrounded by ringing phones and people shouting.
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However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
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I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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I’m supposed to be taking time off. But I’m still writing and I have this Gap advert lined up.
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When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called ‘Aztec,’ I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the ‘typically Mexican landscape‘ around me – banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros – because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.
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The hardest thing about writing, for me, is facing the blank page.
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I didn’t feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel.
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I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that’s not exactly a full-time job. It wasn’t that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn’t. The second just outnumbered the first.
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I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.
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A journey through the Mediterranean is not only inspiring and stimulating, it is also humbling. The men and women who created antique treasures for us to marvel at had to deal with plague, genocide, a world without writing, iron tools, or penicillin – and yet they made something extraordinary of their life and times.
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Writing is a very strenuous thing – it’s like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer’s room.
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Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I’m writing about, who don’t always act in the film afterward.
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I have a beautiful sofa, which is my writing corner, on which I sit every day and look outside the window.
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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
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You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.
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Even when I don’t think I’m writing, I’m writing. There’s some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it’s collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that’s when they come out.
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In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.
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When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
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I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I’m more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.
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I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.
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Everything I do, writing, touring, travelling, it all comes from the punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression – from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go. Make some sense of it.
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My idea of what’s good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that.
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Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I’ve ever faced since I started writing.
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I have a group of cafes and coffee shops that I go to regularly. They usually have an area where I can plug in my computer and have a corner seat where I can do a couple hours of writing or whatever, even the noise of the surrounding people walking by. Those things are the things that stimulate me into writing.
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A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
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Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.
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I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, ‘And now… My Novel!,’ which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
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But with writing, all you need is a pad of paper.
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I love writing songs. I love doing my radio show and talking to the fans and listening to what they have to say, but there’s a certain responsibility that comes along with being given the gift of music. I take that seriously, but at the same time I try to use it to do something that makes a difference in a positive way.
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I have to be entertained by what I’m writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.
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Writing is sort of putting a puzzle together halfway. Then, performing it has always been the completion of it. Once that happens, I’m feeling verbally communal with other people. It’s out there and I feel so much better about it.
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Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
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In a crazy way, writing is a lot like any kind of very complex game – like chess, where you have the knowledge as you’re composing all of the ramifications of each move, of each choice you make.
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I used to type, but now, typing or working with a computer, I get a stiff neck. So I prefer writing longhand.
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People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
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Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you’ll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code.
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I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she’d written: ‘This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!’ That made a big impression on me.
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Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back.
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I like writing about biology, not doing it.
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I write because I can’t imagine not writing.
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The best advice I ever got came from my mother, Estee Lauder: She believed that if you had something good to say, you should put it in writing. But if you had something bad to say, you should tell the person to his or her face.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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‘An Unquiet Mind’ wasn’t hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.
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I don’t know that it’s particularly good for my writing process, but I have gotten some very valuable writing ideas and advice through Twitter and Facebook and other social network sites.
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I don’t put myself into the category of ‘rock star writing his biography.’ That’s because we live our lives by falling into experiences. Things happen to us. Something you do takes hold of you, and then you do a lot of it.
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I’m not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I’ve never understood.
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You know how you have that one thing you would do even if you’re not getting paid to do it? That’s what writing music is for me.
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If I don’t feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around.
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Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
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All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
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In writing a novel about George Sand, I hoped to present her as the talented, beguiling, complicated and occasionally infuriating woman I think she was, but I hope, too, that readers will enjoy the people she surrounded herself with.
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In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.
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I am writing things on my own, but I really believe co-writing makes you a better writer.
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The story was such that I couldn’t make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn’t want to. So, it isn’t the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I’m pleased with it anyway.
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When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.
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Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
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Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
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I’ve always been kind of precocious, but my journey sort of solidified when I was in college and majored in theater. That’s how I knew I wanted to spend my life writing, telling, and performing stories.
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Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I’m sure it’s terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay.
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Everyone who has ever met me for at least five minutes knows I’m a really funny person. I love to laugh and to make people laugh, so writing comedy comes naturally to me.
427
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people’s backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
428
If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
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And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. ‘This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?’ So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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I teach for the Book Trust, which promotes reading and writing with children.
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I’ve been doing nineteen hours a day on London, nothing else, I mean this has been my whole life, and writing has been put on one side, and if I’m privileged enough to be the Mayor of this city, then I will not write again.
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In high school, I went to a place called the Mountain School. It’s on a farm in Vermont, and I read Emerson and Thoreau and ran around the woods. Now I go hiking with a bunch of my comedy buddies. We talk about our emotions. I also do a lot of writing on hikes, just to get the blood flowing and the ideas moving.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
438
Once you’re done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner.
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A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.
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Every time I’ve had to do journalistic investigations, I’ve cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It’s the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
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You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
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Writing your own jokes, you just kind of keep working on something until you think it might work, and then you try it out and hope for the best.
447
I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.
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I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
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Don’t worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.
450
The desire to write grows with writing.
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Although I sometimes enjoy writing from an adult’s perspective, I feel dedicated to the coming of age story – that part of a young person‘s life where he must make a decision that will change his life forever. I still remember what it’s like to be twelve years old.
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Esoteric or inner knowledge is no different from other kinds of human knowledge and ability. It is a mystery for the average person only to the extent that writing is a mystery for those who have not yet learned to write.
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Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I’m always angsty when I’m working my way through a first draft.
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For writing, I get up early in the morning – 5 o’clock, 4:30. I’m a morning person… So I try to do it while people are asleep. The mornings are the nicest.
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I really don’t know why Scarlett has such appeal. When I began writing the sequel, I had a lot of trouble because Scarlett is not my kind of person. She’s virtually illiterate, has no taste, never learns from her mistakes.
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I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn’t lived long enough to experience. That’s why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around.
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I love the writing. I love the idea of typing and seeing it on the computer and printing it out myself and, you know, moving sentences around. I like that.
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Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.
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Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It’s while writing that I think most deeply about things.
464
I don’t believe in condescending to children. I don’t change any writing technique.
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I truly believe that if you put your goals in writing, speak them out loud and work for them, they will happen.
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I started doing ’30 Rock’ and started writing ‘Mystery Team‘ at the beginning of that. While I was doing ‘Mystery Team,’ I started practicing stand-up. While I was doing stand up, I got ‘Community.’ It’s like I planted trees six years ago, and now they have fruit.
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People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.
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The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
473
My singing is my hobby. It’s me and my brother. We just enjoy writing music.
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I like myself better when I’m writing regularly.
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I’ll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.
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The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.
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When I was writing ‘You Suck,’ in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book’s narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
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Heartbreak can definitely give you a deeper sensibility for writing songs. I drew on a lot of heartbreak when I was writing my first album, I didn’t mean to but I just did.
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One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others’. My bedside is piled with books, but it’s duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
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I do like the research part of writing, I must admit.
483
Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
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I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.
485
It gives me confidence to know that what I’m writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I’m writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.
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Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from ‘The Mistress of Spices.’
488
So that’s why one of my rules of parody writing is that it’s gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
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If I’m grumpy I sure do enjoy writing The Walking Dead.
491
Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that’s the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
492
Good writing is like a windowpane.
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The writing of a melody is an emotional moment; success doesn’t make it easy.
497
We speak about understanding each other, having those conversations nationwide – culturally, historically – and yet there’s a lot of gaps. So I want to assist with closing the gap of knowing about and hearing about our Latino communities in terms of literature, in terms of writing.
498
I always believe writing is an indispensable part of one’s political armoury.
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I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
503
Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
504
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you’re not aware there was a writer there.
505
I don’t really have a writing process. I don’t write at all but, honestly, I feel like it’s a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it’s almost like something I wrote.
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Every writer I know has trouble writing.
508
Freedom is the basic prerequisite for writing.
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I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor – I never would have imagined that. Writing books – I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. – I’m not sure I would even have imagined that. I’ve lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.
513
The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don’t have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
514
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.
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I wouldn’t say I’m underrated, but more reserved. Only time will tell, but I’ve been good so far in being consistent and making hit after hit writing for myself and other artists, from rap to R&B, and being able to make those different records.
518
I like writing idealistically, romantically and swashbucklingly.
519
Coding is like writing, and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution. What’s happened is that maybe everybody knows how to use computers, like they know how to read, but they don’t know how to write.
520
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
521
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
522
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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I wouldn’t put a big trust in what people in Silicon Valley say. They may be good at manipulating ones and zeroes and writing software, but beyond that, their contribution to human progress has been pretty dismal. I’m not impressed.
525
If one of my romantic-comedy colleagues had written and directed ‘Love Actually,’ they would have been torn limb from limb. I thought it was awful, contrived, dreadful. I could see every twist and turn. I thought it was despicable. It was the writing that got me.
526
Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
527
It’s what the Pixies always said about music – they were writing songs and just trying not to be boring. That was their main motivation and it worked for them. I remember reading that and thinking that was the way to do it.
528
When I’m writing something, everything falls into place. When I’m not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there’s nowhere to put it all.
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I think for me I was in kindergarten, so I was very young and my teacher acknowledged that I was very dyslexic when it came to reading and writing and processing that information.
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Rock is all about writing your own script; it’s all about pioneering.
533
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
534
Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.
535
Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular – typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.
536
I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.
537
With all respect, I’m sure that we have enough preachers in the world. Through my way of writing, I was capable of being able to say these things and yet not make a person feel as though they’re being preached at.
538
Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.
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When you’re writing, you’re conjuring. It’s a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you’re inviting into the room.
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I was in the middle of filming Season 3 of ‘Grace and Frankie.’ Then the writing process for ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ was happening at the exact same time. And then the pre-production for ‘Fatherless’ was happening at the exact same time as well.
543
I don’t understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
544
Every time I think I know what’s right and wrong, I end up being wrong. All I want to do is explore. I want to see what people would do. I say, ‘What would this person do in this situation?’ and I write it down. I’m not writing manifestos of my political views.
545
You fail only if you stop writing.
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In many ways, writing is the act of saying ‘I,’ of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.
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I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
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When you’re a writer, your song has to resonate with the person you’re writing for in order for them to want to sing it. But if you’re an artist, you can sing whatever you want.
552
I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider’d but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg’d in with infrequency and Discrimination.
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Poetry is its own medium; it’s very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
555
Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that’s, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it’s going to come.
556
I’m more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But ‘Steve Jobs‘ and ‘The Social Network’ have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they’re making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.
557
I’m crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.
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I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.
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I don’t read blogs. I’m living the life they’re writing about. So why read about it?
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Writing or talking about famine and the world’s response to it is not very easy.
567
When I began my career as a flight attendant, I was a 21-year-old with a B.A. in English and stars in her eyes. I wanted to see every city in the world. I wanted to have adventures that, I hoped, would fuel a writing career some day.
568
I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it’s only once the play’s out that the pain is gone.
569
The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
570
Writing is a dog‘s life, but the only life worth living.
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With writing, I felt like it was just my free place where no one told me what to do because it was just my own.
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When I’m writing, I’m constantly thinking about myself, because it’s the only experience I have to draw on. And I don’t see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience, but I know that my songs have validity to them, and that’s why the fans are there.
575
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
576
From 1999 on – until 2003 – I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications – altogether writing over 150 articles.
577
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
578
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
582
When you’re making music, it’s meant to be shared with people. Sometimes, even if I’m writing a song, someone else brings a vibe. There’s something different about it. If someone can play a better bassline than me, I’ll let them do it. I’m just here to fit in and see where it goes.
583
Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.
584
There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself, whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, whether it be in a dance that you see on stage, really in every domain. But I think the question is, you know, where does that fluency and mastery come from?
585
I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I’d won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories.
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I learned that there is an inner strength that blossoms when one cleanses themselves by processing and attempting to comprehend their situation and/or experience. Writing became my therapy!
588
589
I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.
590
There’s always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.
591
592
‘An Octoroon’ was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I’m writing about America’s relationship to its own history. Race or not, it’s a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.
593
I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
594
595
At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, ‘Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.’
596
No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.
597
598
At one point, I wanted to be a wildlife photographer. I also love to travel, so maybe I’d do travel writing.
599
The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do… For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it’s probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.
600
I can see a version of my life where it all becomes meaningless. On a good day, writing seems noble. Other times, it’s narcissistic and pointless.
601
602
I always had a gift with writing. I can really write. I always felt like I can write movies or somehow get into that.
603
To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don’t know about.
604
605
606
Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.
607
I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.
608
609
I like to oversee what I do, so I have a hand in writing my songs. I also have people there to help me with my vision.
610
Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.
611
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
612
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn’t start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn’t feel like I could do that either. It didn’t occur to me to do my own thing.
613
614
I can’t speak for other artists; every group has a different approach. For us, it will always be important to keep working hard, dancing better, writing better songs, touring, and setting an example.
615
The more I talk to people who are at a place I’d like to be at, whether its music or writing, or being a doctor or entrepreneur, sometimes you get lucky, and right away something happens. But for most people, the common denominator of success is just working really hard.
616
Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.
617
When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I’d constantly be that guy who’d get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.
618
In my off-time, I do record. Once in a while, I’ll just go into the studio if there’s a really good song that I have in my head and want to do. I think, as artists, you’re constantly in creative motion. If I stopped writing songs, then that’s a part of me that would stop in my life, and I need constant motion.
619
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
620
I believe writing is where it all begins; you can not make a film look different, you have to write it differently.
621
Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.
622
I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.
623
I often find myself writing about people taking care of each other, or trying to.
624
I’m not a born writer, and I don’t enjoy writing.
625
When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.
626
Anyone who says that writing for children or teens is easier than writing for adults has never tried it, because they are so much more critical than adults. You cannot get anything past them.
627
I don’t really need to stand out, there’s room for everyone. Although I haven’t built a niche yet, I’m just writing love songs.
628
629
There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.
630
631
The more you read, the better you are at writing, no matter what you’re writing. A lot of songwriters miss that and don’t see the connection there, and I’ve always felt like you’re more able to communicate if you have a bigger toolbox to work with.
632
The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice.
633
634
635
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you’re writing about. It doesn’t encumber you, it makes you free.
636
Initially, I thought that Ethereum was a thing that would be used for people to write simple financial scripts. As it turns out, people are writing stuff like Augur on top of it.
637
638
639
I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.
640
641
642
643
As I reflect on the successes and failures of our push for democracy, reading widely in search for a path out of authoritarian rule, I’ll keep writing to encourage myself and those on my side.
644
645
646
647
Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
648
I write… sonnets… and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.
649
650
651
Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.
652
I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. I still don’t, despite all the writing I’ve done.
653
I can’t remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.
654
We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we’d been performing that, but we don’t do that any more.
655
My mom was always writing me notes to get me out of stuff.
656
657
There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.
658
659
660
I’ve always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they’re still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.
661
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
662
Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‘Lights Please’ happens like that.
663
I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and also undertook vocal training since a young age. However, it was only during my time at the University of Oxford did the musician in me came alive.
664
So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.
665
If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.
666
The pleasure from acting comes from having great writing to work with. If it’s well written and the character is interesting, then, as an actor, that’s the raw material I need.
667
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
668
669
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
670
To have a successful writing career, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal. The book, the deadline come first before anything else. Writing is not a job; it is a lifestyle, and it is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. You need self-confidence and an iron carapace.
671
672
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
673
674
Stepping back into theatre, a childhood dream, I always felt like I would be onstage. I hadn’t imagined myself in a composer role… I find it so satisfying to be behind the scenes and writing the music and watching it elevated and characterized by different voices than my own. It’s so exciting.
675
As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.
676
677
678
I believe that reading widely is the best preparation for writing.
679
I’m happy to work until I’m 70 if I’m able to. Actually, I’m happy to keep writing as long as people keep buying my books.
680
I’m writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.
681
682
I suppose more than anything, it’s the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.
683
Writing good ads is easy when you have something to say.
684
Writing doesn’t come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.
685
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
686
Like any kind of writing, there are good days and frustrating days. But even frustrating days can be rewarding sometimes.
687
I was always told you’re not going to make much money from writing. You can actually do it. Now I’ve built a really good, big house out of words.
688
689
My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it’s in theater or in film, that’s it. It doesn’t really matter what the medium is.
690
691
Every acting gig isn’t the same, every writing job isn’t the same, every live performance isn’t the same – the challenge is the level of difficulty or ease, and that may vary.
692
With comedy, I think it’s so important, especially in TV, to know and trust what the writers are writing and just have it down.
693
694
Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint’s obituary.
695
Before we really started writing our own songs in the James Gang, we’d play covers, and then, in the middle of them, we’d go for a jam for four or five minutes. At some point, we had six or seven of those sections, and we didn’t need to cover other people’s songs anymore.
696
I had a certain career as an actor that I think was quite personal as well, and had a lot of integrity, but I wasn’t writing my own things or directing my own movies.
697
698
I first wrote for adults, but when I started writing for young people, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life. I was able to express my own deepest feelings far more than I ever could when writing for adults.
699
700
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
