Writing Quotes - Page 9

• Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Play, Fearless, Succeed

  Natalie Goldberg (2016). “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within”, p.86, Shambhala Publications

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• An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

  J. D. Salinger

  Art, Perfection, Creative

  j.d. salinger (1961). “franny and zooey”

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• Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

  Francis Bacon

  Life, Success, Time

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• To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

  Joan Didion

  Cameras, Structure, Position

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 27, 2011

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• Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Book, Reading, Beer

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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• Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

  Lillian Hellman

  Afterlife, Firsts, Be Good

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• There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Real Talk, Story Writers, Three

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• The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

  John Steinbeck

  Horse, Book, Racing

  "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights". Book by John Steinbeck, 1976.

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• If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

  Lillian Hellman

  Inspirational, Talking, Giving

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• Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

  Jessamyn West

  Friendship, Being Alone, Creativity

  Jessamyn West (1973). “Hide and Seek: A Continuing Journey”, Harcourt

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• I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Growing Up, Party, Believe

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• All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

  E. B. White

  Inspiring, Book, Kids

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.76, Cornell University Press

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• Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Lying, Fiction, Weaving

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• Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Jobs, Nice, Twenties

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  I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.

  Harlan Ellison

  Jobs, Years, Stories

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• My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

  Anton Chekhov

  Lying, Stories, Story Writers

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  Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Night, Journey, Fog

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• We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

  Cecil Day-Lewis

  Inspirational, Self Worth, Order

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• What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

  Bob Dylan

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I went to college, but I learned to write by reading - and writing.

  Daniel Pinkwater

  Reading, College, Reading And Writing

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• If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

  Andrei Tarkovsky

  Mean, Trying, Want

  "Sculpting in Time" by Andrei Tarkovsky, (p. 174), 1986.

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• The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Two, Familiar, Inspiration To Write

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• Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

  C. S. Lewis

  Communication, Mean, Language Words

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• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

  Winston Churchill

  Inspirational, Positive, Badass

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• Writers are always selling somebody out.

  Joan Didion

  Journalism, Selling, Famous Writers

  Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968) p. xvi

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