"The best way to become a writer is to go off and write."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 247 of 1537)
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"They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him."
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"Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t."
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"Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness."
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"When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and is it is cool and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit again."
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"Live it up so you can write it down."
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"Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing."
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"You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you."
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"There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid."
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"Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."
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"Write as well as you can and finish what you start."
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"I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write."
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"Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing."
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"A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill."
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"The only kind of writing is rewriting."
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"To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you."
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"When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough."
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"There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make."
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"To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you."
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"Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works."
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