"The central problem of novel-writing is causality."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 58 of 1537)
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"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."
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"Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing."
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"My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point."
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"Writers are always selling somebody out."
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"Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials."
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"When I write love songs, people think they're really soppy - but I see love as a consolation for the boredom of life."
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"I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading."
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"When the storyteller tells the truth, she reminds us that human beings are more alike than unalike... A story is what it's like to be a human being-to be knocked down and to miraculously arise. Each one of us has arisen, awakened. We do rise."
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"Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it."
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"When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible."
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"Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action."
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"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
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"Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage."
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"I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced."
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"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you."
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"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."
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"I am persecuted because of my writings, I think, therefore, that I should write some more."
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"I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair."
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"Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better."
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