"Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 23 of 1537)
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"I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning."
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"Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money."
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"No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel."
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"He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things."
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"Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing."
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"It takes hard writing to make easy reading."
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"A good book is an event in my life."
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"People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up."
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"And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss."
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"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."
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"Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important."
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"Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."
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"New York has a thousand universes in it that don't always connect but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don't."
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"The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes."
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"A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something."
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"The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive."
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"I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing."
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"The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing."
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"People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it."
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