"A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 139 of 1537)
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"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
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"Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play."
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"I started to write the song. And I was in Gladewater, Texas, one night with Carl Perkins and I said, I've got a good idea for a song. And I sang him the first verse that I had written, and I said it's called "Because You're Mine." And he said, "I Walk The Line" is a better title, so I changed it to "I Walk The Line.""
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"If it were a rainy day, a drunken vigil, a fit of the spleen, a course of physic, sleepy Sunday, an ill run at dice, a long tailor's bill, a beggar's purse, a factious head, a hot sun, costive diet, want of books, and a just contempt for learning - but for these. . .the number of authors and of writing would dwindle away to a degree most woeful to behold."
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"The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole."
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"Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline."
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"A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated."
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"I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity."
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"I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work."
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"In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers."
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"If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living."
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"I can't start writing until I have a closing line."
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"I could not write about a subject sacred to me because I would be too flippant. Fortunately, there are no subjects sacred to me."
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"When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"
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"'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing."
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"I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience."
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"Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none"
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"The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important."
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"Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them."
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