Writing quotes

Writing

30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

30.7K quotes

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Writing quotes (page 311 of 1537)

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Richard Thompson Musician
Writing

"Sitting around home I mostly play acoustic. I've got seven or eight guitars of various sorts, including a baritone. Sometimes at home, because a guitar is just lying around, that's the guitar I pick up rather than actually choosing something. I try to plan ahead for my laziness by leaving interesting things scattered about. If I leave a baritone guitar lying around, that's the one I'll pick up, and I'll start writing baritoney things."

Writing Home Lying
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Richard Thompson Musician
Writing

"The good part of writing is where it gets out of your control and turns into something else. You look at it and think "Whoa, where did that come from? That wasn't what I meant to write, but it's more interesting than what I was intending. Which part of my subconscious or my experience did that come from?" Often the answer isn't clear, and often the line between fiction and fact isn't clear, either."

Thinking Writing Interesting
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Richard Thompson Musician
Writing

"I don't really know how writing process happens, how these songs are arrived at. One of the things I like about the writing process is, I don't necessarily know where it's going, and even if I think I know where it's going, it'll turn out different. I find that exciting and rewarding."

Thinking Writing Song
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well."

Writing Important Three
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur."

Writing Years Spurs
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being."

Writing Able Imagination
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time."

Writing Character Swings
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

""I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades."

Writing Successful Unhappy
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back."

Thinking Writing Silence
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act."

Writing Crazy Sound
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant."

Writing Book Males
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge."

Writing Book Challenges
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics."

Writing Doe Poet
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"No one, evidently, except me has found "No Alarms" poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write."

Writing Able Alarms
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim Poet, Novelist
Writing

"The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then."

Writing Judging Alarms
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