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Writing Quotes
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To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.
Truman Capote
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.
Cyril Connolly
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Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer
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Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
James Joyce
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Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
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I get a fine, warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.
Virgil Thomson
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Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
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I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.
Ludwig van Beethoven
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There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don't you? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.
Stephen King
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It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.
Virginia Woolf
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Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
George Orwell
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[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.
Raymond Chandler
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The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
Virginia Woolf
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Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
Elie Wiesel
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The critics have been writing me off for 20 years. That's nothing new. As far as I know I still have plenty of fans and sell lots of records. Do I care what critics say about me? No, and I don't read reviews.
Madonna
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My writing has gone to bits - like my character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.
Oscar Wilde
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As I am writing, another illustration of ye generation of hills proposed above comes into my mind. Milk is as uniform a liquor as ye chaos was. If beer be poured into it & ye mixture let stand till it be dry, the surface of ye curdled substance will appear as rugged & mountanous as the Earth in any place.
Isaac Newton
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I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.
Virginia Woolf
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All my writing was born out of anger. In order to contain it, I had to write. If I had not written, I would have exploded.
Elie Wiesel
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A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
Simone de Beauvoir
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We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.
C. S. Lewis
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Writing... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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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