"Writing for young readers is almost like dipping into a fountain of youth; for hours a day, I am a child again."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 331 of 1537)
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"I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing."
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"I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before."
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"A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame."
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"I recommend free writing in the morning and the evening as a type of mental shower."
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"On a piece of paper, write down the thing that is stressing you, the obstacle that is in your way. Then put it in a box and just leave it there. At the end of about a week, dispose of it - throw it in the trash or bury it - some sort of ritualistic act of releasing it."
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"Character is plot, plot is character."
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"I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry."
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"The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it."
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""What are you going to do?" "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.""
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"A writer wastes nothing."
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"Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre."
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"If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type."
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"There's all these people involved, and it becomes this huge machine - it stops being just me making my own little songs for myself, or for the world. And it's hard to stop the machine. If you want to take time to write a record, they're like, "OK, tour through March, April, and June, then you can take a few weeks off to record in July before getting back on the road for the European festival circuit." After a while, I had to put my foot down."
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"The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written."
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"If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time."
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"Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is."
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"Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision. I love that aspect of writing. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say: that’s just what I’ve always felt, but you said it clearly."
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"It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone."
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"It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood."
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