"In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 385 of 1537)
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"But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn't really emotionally ready to write about at ten.' 'Fair enough,' I say. 'But in the revision, I want to get some action."
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"I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance."
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"Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check."
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"On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it."
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"Writing is the act of saying "I," of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying "listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.""
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"The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness."
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"There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic."
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"When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color."
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"It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. "Everything went white," those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint."
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"There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing."
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"If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it."
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"Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily."
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"You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will."
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"It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places."
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"Discovery still happens in the writing. You start in nonfiction with a whole lot more going for you, because all the discovery isn't waiting to be made. You've made some of it in the research. As you get deeper into a piece and do more research, the notes are in the direction of the piece - you're actually writing it."
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"I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write."
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"Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public."
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"I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience."
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"Whenever I have time, I try to get in the studio and write, whether it's for me or other artists or my catalog of music. It's definitely one of my favorite parts of the music industry."
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