I personally believe that one learns to write by writing.

~ Jack Jordan

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Yet should there hover in their restless headsOne thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,Which into words no virtue can digest.

~ Christopher Marlowe

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When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time.

~ Stephen King

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I like performing because it's direct contact with live people. I write a good deal of the time but that's introspective creation rather than interaction.

~ Oliver

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I think of myself first as a singer, meaning an interpreter. Then I think of myself as a writer. It is an outlet I have to have. I get very hard to live with without something happening to write about.

~ Oliver

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The moment I realize I just stayed up until five in the morning writing is that moment I know I am meant to be a writer.

~ Anastasia Bolinder

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I like writing, but I like a lot of things. Maybe out of those things, I'm best at writing. Maybe it's what I like best of all. Maybe it's where I've always felt most at home. Or maybe the writing part of me is over. Maybe there's something else I'm supposed to do instead. I don't know.

~ Jennifer Niven

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I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

~ Roald Dahl

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No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself.

~ Elinor Florence

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But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

~ William Zinsser

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Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

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Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.

~ William Zinsser

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There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!

~ Philip Roth

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Identifying as a writer is a matter of self-acceptance. It's not a thing that can be given to you, or bestowed upon you. You are a writer if you write. That's it. If what you are seeking is to be acknowledged as a writer by other people, many of them strangers, you're in for a demoralizing journey. It is a silly club where those who have been 'accepted' are loathe to permit others into. It's sort of like how we Americans love denying our own immigrant origins while railing against immigration.

~ Vincent Louis Carrella

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I would not be myself without writing.

~ Mary Sage Nguyen

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Writing is the only thing that makes me feel alive.

~ Mary Sage Nguyen

Mary Sage Nguyen And Author Writer Writing

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They're often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway.

~ Anne Lamott

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There's a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.

~ Shonda Rhimes

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There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock.

~ Anne Lamott

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It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't be careful enough.

~ William Zinsser

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Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

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It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough

~ William Zinsser

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Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: assistance (help), numerous (many), facilitate (ease), Individual (man or woman), remainder (rest), initial (first), implement (do), sufficient (enough), attempt (try), referred to as (called), and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don't dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don't interface with anybody.

~ William Zinsser

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Breaking through writer's block is like thinking out of the box: Both require an ability to imagine a world outside your four walls or rearranging them to get a better view.

~ Susan J. Mcintire

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One of the hardest things for a writer to do is delete words.

~ Alessandra Torre

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There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.

~ Anne Lamott

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Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.

~ Anne Lamott

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For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

~ Anne Lamott

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I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

~ Annie Dillard

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Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.

~ Anne Lamott

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When writing feels like jumping a cliff, grab the nearest pen!

~ Susan J. Mcintire

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I could be accused of glamourising crime, the favorite question on all journalists’ lips whenever they ask about anyone writing about such things. The answer to that must be an emphatic ‘Yes’. We’ve come to expect our icons of the criminal world to be larger than life, better than anyone else at foiling the final capture scene. We all love a good thriller ....

~ Stephen Richards

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What’s it like being a writer? Mostly it’s like being a child surrounded by adults. My friends have grown-up careers. They balance spreadsheets, analyze data, negotiate deals. They build things, heal patients, teach children. Meanwhile, I’m over here saying “Let’s pretend.

~ Jennifer Froelich

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It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time you write a book you roll the dice again.

~ George R.r. Martin

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The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

~ Annie Dillard

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...originality is little morethan the fine blending of influences.

~ Teju Cole

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You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

~ Annie Dillard

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My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

~ Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Writer Writing

Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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Write and people will come to read. Write and people will heed to your words and share them with others. Not all may relate, but wait, and those who were meant to see it eventually will find it, for truth waits to be found. It searches for no one.

~ Suzy Kassem

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