"I do not wanna write a song like 'Coathanger' so Andrew Breitbart can rage against me on his web site. It's not my idea of fun."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 361 of 1537)
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"When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading."
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"Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself."
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"If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer."
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"Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic."
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"My job as a songwriter is to write good songs."
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"I was the first records editor at Rolling Stone, and there were no rules. There was nothing to fall back on as to how do you write about this kind of music, so people were trying absolutely everything with a great sense of freedom and experimentation and success and failure, and a feeling of, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t because we don’t want to be intimidated by what somebody might think of what we’re saying."
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"Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age."
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"Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them."
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"For me, the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form, because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing, the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements."
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"I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper."
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"Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles."
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"Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."
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"Write comic books if you love comic books so much that you want to write them. Don't write them like movies. Comics can do a lot of things that movies can't do, and vice versa."
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"I think the only way you can get something out is to invest some real emotion into it, which means you're already writing about what's going to happen to you, whether you know it or not. That's why I'm always surprised when people talk about writer's block. Because to me, it can't be stopped."
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"I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction."
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"It surprises me constantly that my sometimes-unorthodox approach has such a large following, but I'm very grateful to my readers for allowing me to continue writing 10 or 12 hours a day."
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"I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience."
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"I thought I could capture the stories of the city on paper. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city. Horror stories you see. I tell you I didn't have to look far for material. Everywhere I looked, there were stories hidden there in the dark corners. . . . I wrote and still there were more. . . . No one would publish them. 'Too horrible,' they said. 'Sick mind,' they said. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city but the horror is too big and it goes on forever."
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"I'm a fan myself, so I try to write the kind of comics I want to read."
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