"What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 189 of 1537)
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"If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny."
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"It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else."
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"I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written."
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"Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up."
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"Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write."
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"Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had."
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"You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know."
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"Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world."
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"When I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three.... The little advanceI now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity."
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"I write to escape ... to escape poverty."
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"Postponement: The father of failure."
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"William Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: “You know those poems you're writing? They're no good.”"
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"I heard an angel speak last night/And he said, "Write!""
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"The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness."
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"Be critical of but not brutal with your writing. If something isn't essential, get rid of it. Remember that good dialogue can serve a whole passel of purposes in your novel, and to overlook one of them is to overlook one of the tools of the craft. Like hitting a nail with a screwdriver, if you know what I mean."
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"Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score."
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"When a man is proud because he can understand and explain the writings of Chrysippus, say to yourself, 'if Chrysippus had not written obscurely, this man would have had nothing to be proud of.'"
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"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love."
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"I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works."
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