"I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 27 of 1537)
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"How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure."
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"If you dream the proper dreams, and share the myths with people, they will want to grow up to be like you."
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"Writing is the painting of the voice."
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"My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application-not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech-and learn them so well that words become works."
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"Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context."
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"We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories."
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"A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief.""
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"When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon."
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"You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over."
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"You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home."
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"Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
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"I am only a little pencil in the hand of our Lord. He may cut or sharpen the pencil. He may write or draw whatever and whenever he wants. If the writing or drawing is good, we do not honor the pencil or the material that is used, but rather the one who used it."
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"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad."
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"Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward."
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"Write in the sand the flaws of your friend."
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"Writing well is the best revenge."
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"The longer I write, the more important I believe it is to write the first draft as fast as possible. In drafting, I push myself so I am at the edge of discomfort...Later, it will be time for consideration and reconsideration, slow, careful revision and editing. But on the first draft I have to achieve velocity, just as you do if you want the bike to balance."
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"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
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"When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind."
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