"When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 232 of 1537)
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"We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature."
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"I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages."
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"After he made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. "They asked for volunteers. It's very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I'll write you the instant I get back." And he had not written anyone since."
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"The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors."
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"I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music."
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"Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write."
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"After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude."
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"It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised."
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"I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all."
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"One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost."
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"You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying."
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"Writing a song is a personal thing, and you have to have a lot of trust to try things and not be embarrassed."
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"When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world"
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"Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction."
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"Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love."
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"You write to help yourself think better, then think to help yourself write better."
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"I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in."
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"People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief."
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"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion."
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