"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 65 of 1537)
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"To me, writing is fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story."
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"I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching."
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"I hated school. I don't trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you."
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"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write."
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"I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries."
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"I could write songs as bad as Wham's if I really felt the urge to, but what's the point?"
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"It usually helps me write by reading - somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear."
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"In the Ghetto, I'd been trying to write for years."
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"Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work... It's much more important to write than to be written about."
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"Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written."
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"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."
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"We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can."
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"When you're writing something and you know it's good, you get flushed, you can feel the blood coursing through your veins, you feel alive, all your nerve endings stand up, something just clicks."
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"If my choice is to, I don’t know, be with a lot of men, or if I enjoy a really physical relationship, I don’t think that’s necessarily being anti-feminist. For me the argument of feminism never really should have come into the picture. Because I don’t know too much about the history of feminism, and so I’m not really a relevant person to bring into the conversation. Everything I was writing was so autobiographical, it could really only be a personal analysis."
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"In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream."
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"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
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"The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer."
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"My dream writing room would be the Imperial Library in Vienna."
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"When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day."
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