"Instead of writing it wrong six times and then writing it right, I think it wrong six times and then write it right the seventh time."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 227 of 1537)
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"I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I've ever met: Every writer I've ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down."
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"When I started publishing, I got offers to write for big magazines. But I would always say, "Well, it's not that I don't want to write for these big magazines, but you can't edit it.""
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"I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing."
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"I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways."
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"Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing."
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"I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled."
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"If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off."
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"Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning."
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"Just write the best you can about the things that concern you most. I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun."
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"No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy."
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"Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it."
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"Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward."
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"To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It's sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Everyday. Alone. Without interruption. Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it's heartbreak most of the time."
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"We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do."
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"For me, writing is inseparable from thinking. I could say the entire undertaking is a vast cerebral construct against my demons. It's the thing that I love. It's my identity."
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"Women do not always have to write about women, or gay men about gay men. Indeed, something good and new might happen if they did not."
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"No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing."
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"My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them."
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"I just admire people like Woody Allen, who every year writes an original screenplay. It's astonishing. I always wished that I could do that."
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