"There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 141 of 1537)
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"While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them."
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"Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for."
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"Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer."
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"The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC."
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"The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears."
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"It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say."
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"I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me"
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"I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway."
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"As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer."
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"Not too many songwriters, when they write songs go for broke. When someone does who's really good, it's astonishing. There's a reason a three-minute song can devastate you, or make you get up and dance, stop what you're doing and go, 'What is that?' It just hits you. And it's a very potent thing you're playing around with."
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"Never give up. And most importantly, be true to yourself. Write from your heart, in your own voice, and about what you believe in."
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"I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time... before writing them down... once I have grasped a theme. I shall not forget it even years later. I change many things, discard others, and try again and again until I am satisfied; then, in my head... [the work] rises, it grows, I hear and see the image n front of me from every angle... and only the labor of writing it down remains... I turn my ideas into tones that resound, roar, and rage until at last they stand before me in the form of notes."
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"I always laugh the hardest at the stuff you see in day-to-day life. Its great when somebody can tell a joke that really makes you laugh hard, but to see some kind of personal interaction that no one could write is so good. Those are always the things that make me laugh."
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"That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me."
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"I’m a nudist by trade and hobby. I grew up in LA and I’ve been fortunate enough to be doing this for a great deal of years; if someone is thinking of me as they’re writing something I take it as a huge compliment and hope that it’s an interesting character at least."
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"The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define."
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"A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood."
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"A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life."
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"It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing."
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