"My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 369 of 1537)
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"I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history."
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"There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry."
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"The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through."
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"I'm a good collaborative writer. I can usually come in and add a couple lines to something, and add a riff or a B-section, or a bridge that will tie things together. I can do stuff like that. But to write a whole song, I don't have the patience for that, I guess."
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"We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print."
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"Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new."
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"It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off."
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"No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done."
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"Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it."
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"Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one."
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"That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her."
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"In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience."
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"To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for."
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"The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing."
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"I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant."
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"The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say."
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"The editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind . writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we "modify" before we print."
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"When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself."
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"You need not expect to get your book right the first time."
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