"Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 11 of 1537)
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"Writing without making mistakes is like vomiting hot air."
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"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."
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"Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."
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"Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over."
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"Who exactly do you want to be? What kind of person do you want to be? What are your personal ideals? Whom do you admire? What are their special traits that you would make your own It's time to stop being vague. If you wish to be an extraordinary person, if you wish to become wise, then you should explicitly identify the kind of person you aspire to become. If you have a daybook, write down who you're trying to be, so that you can refer to this self-determination. Precisely describe the demeanor you want to adopt so that you may preserve it when you are by yourself or with other people."
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"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."
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"one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others"
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"I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper."
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"You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different."
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"All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom."
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"The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language."
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"Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare."
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"He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose."
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"You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be."
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"People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush."
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"Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read."
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"When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy."
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"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic."
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"It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae."
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