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I see people who write characters who are loonies and make them convincing and believable, and I envy them tremendously. I don't really understand them. It's funny, because I've created my own monster. In the 'Great War' and 'American Empire' books, I'm writing the person who is the functional equivalent of Adolf Hitler. I'm inside his head — and that's a very strange place for somebody who thinks of himself as a fairly rational fellow to be. That's alarming
Harry Turtledove
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Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne
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Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.
Even when there is no one.
Margaret Atwood
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She has a fascination with Mayan prophecies, and she's writing a book that's sort of her remembrance of her past incarnation. Whatever she applies herself to, she makes it this beautiful, glorious world around her. All of us kids have always been artistic because of her influence.
Brandon Boyd
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Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.
George Henry Lewes
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Writing is hard work. Even when you start with the raw ingredients – a mad family, a sense of humour, talent…it's hard work. But you do get to sit around in silk pyjamas all day.
Carole Morin
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I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED! I yelled, jerking the whole podium off the floor. Hell, I flunked the third grade twice because—BECAUSE— I was crying so hard that I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand, but this wasn't going to stop me. I was all guts up front now. I was in that smooth-feeling, all-true place that I got into when I'd go to my room and start writing each morning before daybreak…with all my heart and soul.
Victor Villaseñor
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"Thinking is easy," said Goethe, "acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world." And Tolstoy: "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice."
André Maurois
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I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.
Andrew Vachss
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It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.
Anne Lamott
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Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.
Manuel Rivas
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When you're a novelist, you're writing a play but you're acting all the parts, you're controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it's your show.
Robertson Davies
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The fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.
Kenzaburō Ōe
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My hand is very tired but I want to go on writing. I keep resting and thinking. All day I have been two people - the me imprisoned in yesterday and the me out here on the mound; and now there is a third me trying to get in - the me in what is going to happen next.
Dodie Smith
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I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.
Thornton Wilder
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The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.
Lytton Strachey
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In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
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In my dreams I sign chits and file papers, Nikoros muttered. Then I awake to sign real chits and file real papers. I imagine my grave marker will be carved as a writing desk. 'Here lies Nikoros Via Lupa, wifeless and heirless, but gods how he could alphabetize!'
Scott Lynch
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Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. I'll take the money.
P. J. O'Rourke
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Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
David Foster Wallace
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I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
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It is to be hoped—I mean, I hope—that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.
Geoffrey Hill
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What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it's too late to do anything is comical. It's hilarious. We're graduating college. We're so young. We can't, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have.
Marina Keegan
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I ought to have put this in the preface, but I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.
Edith Nesbit
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Let's say you have $1,000,000 tied up in your little company and suddenly your advertising isn't working and sales are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it, your family's future depends on it, other people's families depend on it... Now, what do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?
Rosser Reeves
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Ogden Nash
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