"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 20 of 1537)
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"Both light and shadow are the dance of Love. Love has no cause, it is the astrolabe of God's secrets. Lover and loving are inseparable and timeless. Although I may try to describe love, when I experience it, I am speechless. Although I may try to write about love, I am rendered helpless. My pen breaks, and the paper slips away at the ineffable place where lover loving and loved are one. Every moment is made glorious by the light of Love."
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"When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them."
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"There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story."
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"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."
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"This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space."
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"After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’"
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"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."
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"I'm singing from my heart now more than ever. I've gotten a lot braver with my writing."
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"My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky."
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"If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."
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"Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones."
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"It's not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul."
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"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
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"Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it."
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"If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good"
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"If Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn't be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?"
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"There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place."
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"The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice."
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"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in."
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