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A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.
Blaise Pascal
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My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.
Ernest Hemingway
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What a splendid pursuit Natural History would be if it was all observing and no writing!
Charles Darwin
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The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.
Raymond Chandler
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Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
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Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
Stephen King
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You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair... Come to it any way but lightly.
Stephen King
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The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.
Cicero
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In writing songs I've learned as much from Cézanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.
Bob Dylan
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For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Virginia Woolf
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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
Theodor W. Adorno
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You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.
Stephen King
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For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.
C. S. Lewis
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This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf
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The way to teach in this world is to pretend you're not teaching. Science fiction offers the chance to pretend to look the other way while teaching. Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.
Ray Bradbury
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The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
A. A. Milne
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It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.
Bill Gates
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I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost
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In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us to reach a sensible decision.
Dale Carnegie
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How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway
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Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
Ernest Hemingway
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I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cos nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing.
Bob Dylan
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Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.
Abraham Lincoln
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As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.
Henry David Thoreau
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Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
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