"I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 269 of 1537)
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"I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters."
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"I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America."
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"Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence. We have to decide then to ignore the violence and create a gentler world in our fiction, or to heighten the violence through the use of point-of-view in order to explore it and gain some insight and understanding. Since I'm living with the violence and trouble in my brain, it's kind of a relief to write about it, to get it on paper, to put it in context, to find meaning in it."
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"Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books."
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"It just happens I write fast and always have done."
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"I don't know how to write jokes from the point of view of a six-foot-two guy. So, I'll always talk about it, but I just don't want it to be the absolute focus of all of my act."
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"The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting."
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"I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc... to find success writing children's novels."
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"If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators."
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"All I have to do is keep my spirit, feelings and conscience like a sheet of blank paper, and let the Spirit and power of God write upon it what He pleases. When He writes, I will read; but if I read before He writes, I am very likely to be wrong"
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"I always write with an audience in mind. If I feel that [connection] coming back at me then I feel like I'm doing my job. That's why people come to my music - for some emotional experience or a perspective, either on their own lives, or on the world that they're living in."
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"I'm used to writing something, it becomes a record, it comes out. Then I go perform and I play it and I get this immediate feedback from the audience. So that's been the pattern of my life."
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"You need two things to remain very, very present. You need to continue to write well and engage yourself in the issues of the day. And you have to continue to make good, relevant records."
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"I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people."
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"You still had to find the music inside your language. You know, it was - that's a big part of what sort of moved me to begin writing the book. I wrote a little essay and I felt, yeah, this is a good voice. This is a good feeling. It feels like me."
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"I'm not in any rush. I'm not somebody who, if I write a song, I get it out. That's not something I've ever really quite done."
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"I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?"
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"The different social forces that affected my parents' lives or my friends' lives or I saw around me became essential for me to write about."
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"I could never write my memoirs, just because too many people are still alive and would be hurt."
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