"Finish what you start. Keep submitting until it sells."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 327 of 1537)
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"Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?"
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"But if you didn't have more urgent things to do after supper [in boot camp], you could write a letter, loaf, gossip, discuss the myriad mental shortcomings of sergeants and, dearest of all, talk about the female of the species (we became convinced that there was no such creatures, just mythology created by inflamed imaginations - one boy in our company claimed to have seen a girl, over at regimental headquarters; he was unanimously judged a liar and a braggart)."
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"When I was a kid I would much rather have been a good baseball player or a hit with the girls, but I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me. Not that I wouldn't rather make love, but the work has become a habit."
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"If you have a book to write, write it. If you want to record an album, record it. No need to wait for someone in a cubicle halfway across the country to decide if you're worthy."
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"I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing."
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"But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about."
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"Books work as an art form (and an economic one) because they are primarily the work of an individual."
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"If you're going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It's simple: if three weeks go by and you haven't taken action on what you've written down, you wasted your time."
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"There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we're here [on this planet]."
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"What am I writing for anyway? Is it like dreaming? Is it a benevolent process? Something that moves the past forward? And what about those people who say all you get from looking at the past is a stiff neck?"
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"I think everything has its place. So if the ideas or the fluidity isn't coming in writing, maybe it's related to ingestions."
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"Interest in reading memoirs is universal. What has happened is that people are writing about more and more outrageous things. Our threshold for weirdness - you can't have just a normal childhood - has gone way up."
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"When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness."
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"Where I'm from, you learned about God before you learned to read and write. Our faith is what grounds us."
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"You never write a speech in advance because if you don't get to use it, you'll be heartbroken."
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"Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don't like the labels, they're marketing tools, and I certainly don't worry about them when I'm writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek."
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"Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them."
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"I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time."
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"Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight."
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