"No man can write who is not first a humanitarian"
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Writing quotes
Writing
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Writing quotes (page 94 of 1537)
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"You have to write badly in order to write well."
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"To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature."
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"Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished."
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"If I had my way, I would write the word 'insure' over every door of every cottage and upon the blotting pad of every public man, because I am convinced that, for sacrifice that are conceivably small, families can be secured against catastrophes which otherwise would smash them forever."
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"Since I was a kid, I could make up stories, I could make up funny jokes and I could always do it. When I'm walking down the street or having dinner, ideas will hit me, and I write them down on matchbooks or napkins and throw them in the draw."
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"You have the greatest soul, the noblest nature, the sweetest, most loving heart I have ever known, and my love, my reverence, my admiration for you, you have increased in one evening as I should have thought only a lifetime of intimate, loving association could have increased them. You are more wonderful and lovely in my eyes than you ever were before; and my pride and joy and gratitude that you should love me with such a perfect love are beyond all expression, except in some great poem which I cannot write."
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"During the course of the year a number of ideas just come up automatically. I could be walking down the street. Or shaving. An idea will hit me and I'll write it down. Then, when I'm ready to write, I check my little matchbooks and napkins and find that it is good or it's pretty terrible. There are other times when I don't have any ideas and I'll go into a room and close the door and I sit and sweat it out for a day or a month and eventually I come up with [something]."
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"A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious."
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"Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating."
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"You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it."
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"If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that."
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"Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up."
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"Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone."
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"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic."
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"'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia."
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"You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property."
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"The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them."
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"Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such."
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"On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant."
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