Writing

Tom Robbins Novelist, Essayist

Writing

"Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better."

Writing Helping Compare

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Tom Robbins Novelist, Essayist

Writing

"I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum."

Writing Years Mother

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Tracy Chapman Singer-Songwriter

Writing

"I often write either really early in the morning, or really late at night."

Writing Night Morning

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Tracy Kidder Author

Writing

"At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done."

Writing Book Good Day

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Tracy Chevalier Author

Writing

"I try to write 1,000 words a day - about three pages. When I reach 1,000 words I feel good. Less than that: a failure. More than that: tired."

Writing Tired Feel Good

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Tracy Kidder Author

Writing

"I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in."

Writing Book Effort

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Truman Capote Author, Journalist

Writing

"It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them."

Writing Pieces Clouds

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Truman Capote Author, Journalist

Writing

"It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing."

Writing Littles Bad Writing

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Truman Capote Author, Journalist

Writing

"Technically I feel total fluidity in writing. I feel there's nothing technically that I can't do the way a certain sort of pianist feels that. But that doesn't mean it comes easily. It doesn't."

Writing Mean Fluidity

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Toni Morrison Novelist, Essayist

Writing

"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic."

Thinking Writing Discovery

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Toni Morrison Novelist, Essayist

Writing

"The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it."

Writing School College

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Toni Morrison Novelist, Essayist

Writing

"I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have."

Thinking Writing Couple

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Tom Waits Singer-songwriter, Actor

Writing

"I like writing melody without an instrument. It's just so - it's more like the choreography of a bee; you just go."

Writing Instruments Bees

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Seamus Heaney Poet, Playwright

Writing

"The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful..."

Writing Self Forgetful

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Seamus Heaney Poet, Playwright

Writing

"Write whatever you like!"

Writing

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Seamus Heaney Poet, Playwright

Writing

"The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here."

Writing Dream Night

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Rich Mullins Musician

Writing

"I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together."

Thinking Writing Wise

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Richard Bach Author

Writing

"Books arent written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back."

Writing Book Letting Go

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Richard Bach Author

Writing

"It's like a pulsar inside me. There is this great burst of energy, forcing me to write, and then the star goes quiet for a time, and I think it's gone, but it's gathering energy for another burst. And I seem to be almost unwilling participants in this."

Thinking Writing Stars

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Richard Ford Novelist

Writing

"You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself."

Writing Stories Influence

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