"Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 334 of 1537)
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"It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing."
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"I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line. It's a weird way to move forward. It's kind of like a way to caterpillar your way through these great woods. The best ones, whatever I feel like I'm writing about, some other secret thing will begin to come into focus."
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"And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way."
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"You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu."
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"I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard."
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"I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier."
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"I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day."
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"I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it's amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky."
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"I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing."
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"I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write."
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"I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions."
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"Even when I'm writing in character I'm normally still writing about things I know or things that have happened to me or using that character to start an exploration of my own consciousness. Really though, any character that you can examine is just an examination of a part of your own consciousness."
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"I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment."
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"Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing."
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"One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter."
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"The fact of picking up an instrument and writing a song and expressing yourself publicly has a powerful political dimension."
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"Half the rhymes you write, you're saying that you're better than the other MC. That's how we keep the craft sharp."
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"I wouldn't write about sh*t I don't know. You won't hear me write about politics in Africa and stuff, because I don't know enough about it. And I would never rap about something I can't back up."
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"I write rhymes with addition and algebra, mental geometry."
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