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The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.
Paul de Man
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For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
Françoise Sagan
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People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.
Sharron Angle
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The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.
Fredric Jameson
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I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
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Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
Truman Capote
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I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.
Poul Anderson
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And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
Larry Niven
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The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it.
Aharon Appelfeld
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Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.
John Backus
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As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy... Translation is very much like copying paintings.
Boris Pasternak
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Recipe for writing novels:
Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait.
Charles Reade
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As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
Georges Bizet
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If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.
Hugh Prather
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
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Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence — a lot passes you by — simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
Anita Brookner
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Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.
Georges Simenon
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If it is indeed impossible — or at least very difficult — to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
J. M. Coetzee
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Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.
Wole Soyinka
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
E. L. Doctorow
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I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.
Herman Wouk
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Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
E. L. Doctorow
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Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
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What civilians do not understand—and to a writer anyone not a writer is a civilian—is that writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.
John Gregory Dunne
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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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