"You develop a style from writing a lot."
Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 234 of 1537)
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"Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe."
"I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all."
"For better or worse, I seem to gravitate toward writing about something or someone else, then have my own self shove its way into that story. It seems insanely narcissistic. But I also think there's a particular effect that comes from using my autobiography in service to another story, as opposed to being the subject. I'm much more comfortable working in that mode. And I do think I have a persona or mood that I keep coming back to: self-conscious, self-critical, unsure. I write a lot about bodies, particularly male ones, usually as a point of emphasis for my insecurities about my own."
"I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences."
"A good edit process turns rocks into diamonds, and every author should love that part as much as the creative phase. I do love it. It's a different side to writing. It's like the fine-tuning."
"If suddenly you do not exist, If suddenly you are not living, I shall go on living. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall go on living."
"For me writing is like breathing. I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing."
"XVII Lady, i will touch you with my mind. Touch you and touch and touch until you give me suddenly a smile,shyly obscene (lady i will touch you with my mind.)Touch you,that is all, lightly and you utterly will become with infinite care the poem which i do not write."
"Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week."
"Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages."
"I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'"
"The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?"
"The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them."
"I like to write a lot of satire."
"So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things."
"Only in a novel are all things given full play."
"I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from."
"The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute."
"The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story."