"Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 32 of 1537)
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"I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged."
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"A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book."
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"I started to write an apology, but I don't have anything to say I'm sorry for."
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"A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light."
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"If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent."
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"It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest."
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"If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor."
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"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
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"Copy is not written. If anyone tells you ‘you write copy’, sneer at them. Copy is not written. Copy is assembled. You do not write copy, you assemble it. You are working with a series of building blocks, you are putting the building blocks together, and then you are putting them in certain structures, you are building a little city of desire for your person to come and live in."
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"An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else."
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"Writing is a weapon and it’s more powerful than a fist could ever be."
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"The idea of taking a song, envisioning the overall sound in my head and then bringing the arrangement to life in the studio...well, that gives me satisfaction like nothing else."
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"Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don’t do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don’t say it—or written something as well as you, don’t write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings."
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"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
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"I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels."
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"Today in many western countries, nobody dares question the Holocaust whose nature is questionable. According to the reports I have received, in America if people decide to write something against homosexuality on the basis of psychological and sociological principles, they will be prevented from publishing their work. How is it that these people feel obligated to respect freedom of expression?"
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"Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention."
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"I write my books in my head, and not in a specific study with a view. The view is from my inner eyes."
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"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
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