"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 14 of 1537)
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"Nature never writes a blind hand."
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"Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing."
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"Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that"
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"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."
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"The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood."
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"The truth is, I initially became a singer-songwriter while still in my teens because it was the only way to guarantee that somebody on earth would sing the songs I was writing. Since then, I've performed just about everywhere: rock clubs, concerts halls, arenas, TV."
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"Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time."
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"I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer."
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"I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form."
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"I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks."
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"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
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"For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable."
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"I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people."
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"As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?"
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"There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!"
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"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work."
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"Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral." A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio."
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"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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"When you spend time with your friends, what do you talk about? Those things which made an impression on you that day, that week ... I write stories the same way. Events at home, in school, at work, in the street, these are the bases for a story. Some experiences leave such a deep impression that instead of talking about them at the club I work them into a novel."
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