"Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes"
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 102 of 1537)
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"All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later."
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"It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well."
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"The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head."
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"Everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it's not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory."
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"In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring."
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"My job is writing. I get paid to do it. When was the last time you heard someone challenge a doctor for making money off of cancer?"
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"You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies."
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"Just write about what bites you and damn the rest."
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"I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now."
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"We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!"
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"I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world."
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"Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it — make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me —write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair."
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"I don't know what I think until I write it down."
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"My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. I think figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject, but I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time."
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"The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words."
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"America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past."
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"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos."
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"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."
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"To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth."
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