"I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 339 of 1537)
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"What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work."
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"The trap into which all writers have, will, or should fall into, of writing The Great American Watchamacallit, is such an uncluttered and inviting one that from time to time I'm sure even the greatest have to pull themselves up short by the Shift key to remind themselves that it is story first that they should write."
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"Writing is a holy chore."
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"The thing that I'm most passionate about, I'm writing a book called 'Jab Jab Jab Jab Jab Right Hook,' and it really focuses on how to story-tell in a noisy, ADD world."
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"I never thought I'd be a person who would want to write books...I promise you not a single English teacher I've ever had would have thought that this would be going on right now."
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"For me, writing clarifies things. It gives meaning, and it makes me see the connections."
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"Once I hit 25, I realized I had to do more than just be an actor. I love acting, but there's something that makes it difficult to just be a man, a grownup. Not to take away from any actors, but I knew I wasn't going to be Tom Cruise. I knew I was a character actor, which is great and I'm proud of it. But I knew that I wanted to do more. I started producing and directing and writing and stuff for the theater, and then that grew out of hand and I sort of lost my control. I've always loved the process of filmmaking. Now I'm much more into producing docs, but I want to direct features."
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"I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty."
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"If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between this image and the inevitable fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstances, write it down."
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"I write so slowly, I could write with my own blood and not hurt myself."
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"I'm not a nervous person. I'm not afraid to be on TV. I'm only afraid when I write. When I'm at my desk I feel like most people would feel if they went on TV."
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"If there had been a job of being a reader, I would have taken that, because I love to read and I don't love to write. That would be blissful."
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"For the movie review columns, I always knew exactly what I was going to write about - the movies."
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"I never would start writing before midnight and I would finish at, like, seven in the morning."
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"I have a real aversion to machines. I write with a pen. Then I read it to someone who writes it onto the computer. What are those computer letters made of anyway? Light? Too insubstantial. Paper, you can feel it. A pen. There's a connection. A pen goes exactly at your speed, whereas that machine jumps. And then, that machine is waiting for you, just humming "uh-huh, yes?"
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"I'm such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don't need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself."
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"Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter."
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"There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers. People seem to think there is some connection between talking and writing, but I love to talk and if there were some connection between the two of them I would be the most prolific writer in the history of the world."
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"There is nothing more mine than my writing, nothing I'm more proprietary about."
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