"I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 322 of 1537)
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"you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough."
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"I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right."
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"I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape."
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"It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it’s just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you’re going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job."
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"[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time."
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"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."
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"Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina."
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"...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it."
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"We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down."
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"I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about."
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"The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart."
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"My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am."
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"Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success."
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"The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it."
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"Writing is a mysterious activity."
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"If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that."
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"I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers."
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"A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2."
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"You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write."
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