"Some say writing is its own reward. I write for money, but writing for money is not so bad, especially when that writing brings you joy."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 245 of 1537)
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"To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rule of grammar."
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"The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself."
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"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers."
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"No one can do without some semblance of immortality, and even less will they deny themselves the right to seek it out in the form of this or that reputation, starting with the literary... Since death has come to be accepted by all as the absolute end, everyone writes."
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"I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do."
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"A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one."
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"I think that whether you've just begun writing or whether you've been writing for fifty years - I mean, I'm excited to get there and tell you about it when I do - I think that there's always the challenge of believing in yourself enough to get the work done and not being so taken with yourself that you're unwilling to continue to work on the work."
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"It's very difficult, I think for most writers, to carve out the time and the kind of imaginative space to do the writing that you really want to do and also to be an active, engaged, compassionate, giving human being in the world, to the people around you and to your broader community."
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"If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that."
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"There are as many different ways to write a novel as there are varieties of human consciousness, so I am totally delighted if people want to use words that come from genres to describe how this book functions because those words are accurate."
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"[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon."
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"Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet."
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"Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may have on the mantle of authority, but in fact, you're just a writer helping other writers think through their problems. Your experience with the problems you've tried to solve comes into play in how you try to teach them to solve their problems."
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"The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people."
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"Write me of hope and love, and hearts that endured."
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"When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority."
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"A lot of people get to the point in their careers where blurbs are ghostwritten for them, because they're like, "I want to support this person, it's good for my career," and so they get someone at the publishing house to do it, or they copy something from the press release. People write their own blurbs, absolutely, some huge percentage of the time."
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"If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate your work based on how much they relate to it, so it’s like, well, who’s the narcissist?"
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"To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all."
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