"I was inspired to write children's books, but without blood and gore."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 167 of 1537)
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"No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature."
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"All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing."
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"I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction."
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"I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry."
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"I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing."
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"I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that."
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"Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems."
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"I see but one rule: to be clear."
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"In the arts, in places where you're not going to save lives or save species, I think there's no reason to play ball. I can't imagine a serious poet who would want to write or perform for most recent inauguration. I'd be very surprised if there were an inaugural poem, and I can't really imagine what that would be."
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"I don't want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left."
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"I put a lot of effort into writing 'A Briefer History' at a time when I was critically ill with pneumonia because I think that it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion."
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"When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."
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"Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories."
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"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
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"Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad."
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"Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up."
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"I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose."
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"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."
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"As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?"
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