"Most writers write haphazardly. The actor is fighting unjustified words all the time."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 53 of 1537)
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"Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster."
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"I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time."
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"People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself."
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"I guess there are never enough books."
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"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself."
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"I had a song called "Folsom Prison Blues" that was a hit just before "I Walk The Line." And the people in Texas heard about it at the state prison and got to writing me letters asking me to come down there. So I responded and then the warden called me and asked if I would come down and do a show for the prisoners in Texas."
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"In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays."
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"Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing."
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"Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write."
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"I could not think without writing."
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"I love the song 'I Hope You Dance' by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it."
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"The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones."
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"Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish."
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"...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?"
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"Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."
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"Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
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"Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life."
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"Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing that shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve."
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"Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone."
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