Writing

Warren Buffett Investor, Businessman

Writing

"You have to be able to communicate in life and probably schools underemphasize that. If you can't talk to people or write, you're giving up your potential."

Writing School Giving Up

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Willa Cather Novelist, Short Story Writer

Writing

"The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please."

Writing Fighting Caring

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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist

Writing

"All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them."

Writing Waiting Hard Work

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T. S. Eliot Poet, Playwright

Writing

"What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t."

Writing Trying Agony

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Teju Cole Author, Photographer

Writing

"Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three."

Writing Three Rioting

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Virginia Woolf Novelist

Writing

"As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall."

Writing Book Fall

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Ray Bradbury Author

Writing

"Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers."

Writing Careers Inspire

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Toni Morrison Novelist, Essayist

Writing

"There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays"

Writing Differences Hard Work

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Toni Morrison Novelist, Essayist

Writing

"The writing is - I'm free of pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing."

Writing Pain Imagination

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Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Author, Actress

Writing

"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

Writing Judging Down And

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Sinclair Lewis Novelist

Writing

"Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead."

People Writing Long

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Sylvia Plath Poet, Novelist

Writing

"I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I."

Thinking Writing Jealous

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Naguib Mahfouz Novelist

Writing

"I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me."

Writing Book Reading

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J. Cole Rapper, songwriter

Writing

"I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I'm conscious of the mainstream without selling out."

Writing Rap Average

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J. Cole Rapper, songwriter

Writing

"I'm half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That's why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I've seen so many."

Writing White Perspective

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Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Physician, Poet, Essayist

Writing

"Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?"

Thinking Writing Science

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Nathaniel Hawthorne Novelist

Writing

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Writing Reading Powerful

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Neil Gaiman Author

Writing

"Somebody said that writers are like otters... Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do a better trick or a different trick because they'd already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so let's do something different."

Writing Giving Otters

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Marguerite Duras Writer, Filmmaker

Writing

"Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country."

Men Writing Country

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Lee Child Author

Writing

"The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end."

Writing Way Answers

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