"One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke."
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 73 of 1537)
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"I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice - anything just to get a paper bag. And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook."
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"What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness."
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"I can write anywhere."
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"Songwriting is ... all about intuition - this thing pops into your head for a reason and it's up to you to follow it. It's like there's a spirit, or intuitive network, that comes through all of us, but most people don't take the time to think about it or remember it. These little things pop into our heads - it's just a process of intuition. The initial thought comes in a baby state, and you work on that some more."
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"If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down."
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"There is something magical about putting a problem in writing. It is almost as though by writing about what is wrong, you start to discover new ways of making it right."
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"The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before."
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"Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound."
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"Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish."
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"I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances."
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"I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television."
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"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."
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"Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision."
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"Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come."
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"Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out."
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"As Bertrand Russell once wrote, two plus two is four even in the interior of the sun."
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"I usually write from the rhythm section...If a drummer got a funky beat on some things - like a half-shuffle or a shuffle or a backbeat that's even - I can write something."
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"Freedom to speak and write about public questions is as important to the life of our government as is the heart to the human body. In fact, this privilege is the heart of our government. If that heart be weakened, the result is debilitation; if it be stilled, the result is death."
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"All I want to do, is write rock and roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn't lose anything; it would be timeless, in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics."
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