"Someday, I'm gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I'm gonna get that faculty together."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 253 of 1537)
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"I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals."
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"In fact, in Europe, I'm more kind of this bloke what writes lots of stuff."
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"You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff."
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"We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies."
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"Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel."
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"Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike."
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"A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane."
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"God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed."
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"One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either."
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"When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on."
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"No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories."
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"You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal."
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"I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was."
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"Fine writing, according to Mr. Addison, consists of sentiments which are natural without being obvious."
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"My wife and I replaced our nest with one on wheels. The RV became our new home. It's remarkable how homey it became and how quickly. It's obviously very condensed, and we do travel light, but when you think about what you really need, we have the basics - a bed, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a table to sit at to eat and write."
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"We are innately creative beings capable of writing a love story worth living, and we cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity to experience nourishing relationships."
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"Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it."
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"Write down how you really feel, not how you wish you felt or how you think you should feel, but how you really feel. Don't try to change it. Honor it: "This is how I feel." Express it, and then it's not suppressed and stored somewhere in your liver or somewhere else."
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"I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language."
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