"Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 208 of 1537)
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"I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write."
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"I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting."
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"An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen."
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"there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations"
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"I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same."
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"Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style."
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"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself."
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"When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence."
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"Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts."
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"When I hit a period of not being able to write music, I get up and walk away. It's pretty mean but it's true."
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"The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour."
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"I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample."
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"Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply and that is all. For me, style - which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite - is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organized. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write."
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"To vest a few fallible men — prosecutors, judges, jurors — with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill called a "moral police," is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products. If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do likewise to a work of genius."
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"The exit from agony is always there. The tunnel out of the agony sector is always in front of you and yet you don't take it. You don't take it by choice. You want to indulge a lot and be in pain. The easiest way out is to write a list of what you're grateful for. If everybody literally did that before they went to bed at night, there'd be no unhappy people."
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"My dream in life is to write the one gag that makes everyone in the world laugh."
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"You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down."
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"We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality."
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"My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure."
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