"You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 276 of 1537)
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"Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim."
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"I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)"
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"My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him."
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"My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration."
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"My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along."
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"I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up."
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"I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me."
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"All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “here it is."
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"I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it."
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"My best experience as a writer was working with Michael Ondaatje. He let me dismantle his novel, reimagine it, and still had dinner with me and gave me good notes. But the best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life."
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"You realize after you travel enough that there's some things that, no matter how good you are at making television, no matter how good your cameras are, how well it's edited, there's no way the lenses could have captured the moment, and there's no way you will ever be able to write about it and do it justice."
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"Writing anything is a treason of sorts."
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"I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books."
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"I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there."
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"I think it's important if you're going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking - it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I'm not interested."
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"It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about."
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"I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing."
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"There's something not normal about you if you're writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you're the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that's tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that's not normal either."
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"When I was writing 'Kitchen Confidential,' I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car."
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