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Do not wait for inspiration. Create it.
Author:
Jack London
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Believe in the power of your own story, for it has the potential to inspire and uplift others.
Author:
Jordan Thompson
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Embrace the journey of self-discovery, for authenticity is not found in conformity but in the courage to be true to yourself.
Author:
Maya Angelou
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Writer's block is the greatest side effect of boredom.
Author:
Jason Zebehazy
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For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom.
Author:
Cao Yu
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A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
Author:
Marguerite Yourcenar
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I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
Author:
Marguerite Young
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A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
Author:
Marguerite Young
-
This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer's block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what's going on has really helped.
Author:
Thom Yorke
-
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
Author:
William Yeats
-
When a writer admits that he has an affection for something which he has written, it is high time to pray for his soul.
Author:
Dornford Yates
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Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.
Author:
Chelsea Yarbro
-
I think it is probably more important to attend specialized conventions for a journeyman writer than any other, but it's useful at all stages of a career, if for nothing else, to find out how the industry is working at any given time.
Author:
Chelsea Yarbro
-
As a male writer, women are always what men pursue, and their world is always a mystery. So I always tried to present as many views as possible on women's worlds.
Author:
Gao Xingjian
-
Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing.
Author:
George Woodcock
-
I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing.
Author:
George Woodcock
-
Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
-
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
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When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
-
That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.
Author:
Tobias Wolff
-
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Author:
Thomas Wolfe
-
Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.
Author:
P. Wodehouse
-
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
Author:
Jeanette Winterson
-
I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.
Author:
Jeanette Winterson
-
I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.
Author:
Malcolm Wilson
-
I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.
Author:
Walter Williams
-
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.
Author:
Walter Williams
-
Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.
Author:
Walter Williams
-
An incinerator is a writer's best friend.
Author:
Thornton Wilder
-
I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.
Author:
Gene Wilder
-
I am an old, old friend of Aaron Sorkin's, who is the executive producer and writer. He had been talking about doing a political show for a long time and I had been interested in it for a long time. The moment I became available, he called me last year and asked me if I wanted to do it and then I just had to audition for the powers that be, and I got it.
Author:
Bradley Whitford
-
Aaron is a very passionate, maniacal writer so the scripts really come from him, but he is very open to... y'know, we'll plan ideas and we'll certainly tussle about stuff when the script comes out. So, to a certain extent, he's very interested. If there's some problem or something that doesn't ring true, he wants to know why and he wants to correct it or fight for it.
Author:
Bradley Whitford
-
But I work harder now because I have so much more exposure. And actually the harder you work as a writer, the better you get at it. It's like anything else. It's a muscle you have to exercise. I write more now than ever.
Author:
Ron White
-
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
Author:
E. White
-
I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.
Author:
E. White
-
A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
Author:
E. White
-
I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.
Author:
Samuel West
-
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Author:
Jessamyn West
-
In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.
Author:
Mary Wesley
-
I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.
Author:
James Welch
-
Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.
Author:
James Welch
-
I've always thought of myself as an organic writer, rather than a cerebral one. I feel my way along as I go, hoping I'll get to the place I intend to reach.
Author:
Len Wein
-
I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.
Author:
Len Wein
-
A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.
Author:
Len Wein
-
It is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.
Author:
Noah Webster
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Calvino was not a writer of hits; he was a writer of classics.
Author:
William Weaver
-
I've got America's best writer for $300 a week.
Author:
Jack Warner
-
The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore.
Author:
Joseph Wambaugh
-
So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould.
Author:
Edmund Waller
-
Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
Author:
Derek Walcott
-
As a songwriter, I was influenced by David Bowie - a great writer. A class above everybody in so many ways. Lennon and McCartney, of course. Class stuff. David Cousins was my favorite lyricist.
Author:
Rick Wakeman
-
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Author:
Peter Vries
-
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
Author:
Kurt Vonnegut
-
I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.
Author:
A. Vogt
-
But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.
Author:
A. Vogt
-
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
Author:
A. Vogt
-
No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.
Author:
Alfred Vigny
-
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
Author:
Gore Vidal
-
I'll never be a good writer, and no chance of being a good actor.
Author:
Matthew Vaughn
-
Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
Author:
Jack Vance
-
There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
Author:
Jack Vance
-
I worked for half a cent a word. I'm not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things.
Author:
Jack Vance
-
Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.
Author:
Paul Valery
-
The idea that you're not a writer until you're published is a lie.
Author:
Andrew Vachss
-
I was too heavy to be a jockey and too honest to be a producer, so I became a writer.
Author:
Leon Uris
-
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
Author:
John Updike
-
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
Author:
Anne Tyler
-
But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
Author:
Anne Tyler
-
You can't be too old to be a writer, but you can definitely be too young!
Author:
Joanna Trollope
-
It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.
Author:
Anthony Trollope
-
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
Author:
P. Travers
-
And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.
Author:
Robert Towne
-
I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.
Author:
Goh Tong
-
I've yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine, and we have a tendency to treat them like that.
Author:
Michael Tolkin
-
As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.
Author:
Richard Thompson
-
I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.
Author:
Clarence Thomas
-
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
Author:
Donna Tartt
-
Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.
Author:
Donna Tartt
-
So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.
Author:
Donna Tartt
-
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
Author:
Donna Tartt
-
A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.
Author:
Quentin Tarantino
-
I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.
Author:
Quentin Tarantino
-
If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.
Author:
Quentin Tarantino
-
I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
Author:
Amy Tan
-
I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
Author:
Amy Tan
-
As a writer, I've always been interested in others.
Author:
Antonio Tabucchi
-
I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.
Author:
John Synge
-
As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!
Author:
Jacqueline Susann
-
I have before me a newspaper slip on which a writer expresses the opinion that no one should be allowed to possess more than one million dollars' worth of property.
Author:
William Sumner
-
The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
Author:
William Styron
-
When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you've got a good writer.
Author:
Theodore Sturgeon
-
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.
Author:
Theodore Sturgeon
-
The writer's shortness of breath became more and more distressing as he rose.
Author:
Hudson Stuck
-
But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.
Author:
Lytton Strachey
-
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
Author:
Rex Stout
-
It's okay to be a bad writer if you have something to say.
Author:
Bill Stott
-
The show was number one in the ratings, Gordon Russell was our head writer, the story lines were magnificent and the acting most exciting. I loved working with Judith Light and all the other actors on the show at that time.
Author:
Michael Storm
-
I have a cheat-sheet for each one of my characters about their personality, the way they look, etc. So there is no possible way that I could have writer's block.
Author:
R. Stine
-
I want to go to college. I'm going to take four years off. I don't want to miss that. I want to be a writer. I think that'd be awesome.
Author:
Kristen Stewart
-
Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.
Author:
Anne Stevenson
-
Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.
Author:
Cat Stevens
-
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
Author:
John Steinbeck
-
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
Author:
John Steinbeck
-
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
Author:
John Steinbeck
-
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
Author:
Gertrude Stein
-
I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.
Author:
Ralph Steadman
-
I am a sensitive writer, actor and director. Talking business disgusts me. If you want to talk business, call my disgusting personal manager.
Author:
Sylvester Stallone
-
The writer is the engineer of the human soul.
Author:
Joseph Stalin
-
When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money.
Author:
Norman Spinrad
-
I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
Author:
Mickey Spillane
-
I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.
Author:
Mickey Spillane
-
Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.
Author:
Mickey Spillane
-
Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.
Author:
Mickey Spillane
-
If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
Author:
Mickey Spillane
-
I suppose I'm most influenced by any good, commercial writer. I learn from everyone.
Author:
Nicholas Sparks
-
Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.
Author:
Nicholas Sparks
-
One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
Author:
Wole Soyinka
-
In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer.
Author:
Terry Southern
-
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Author:
Susan Sontag
-
Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
Author:
Stephen Sondheim
-
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
Author:
Stephen Sondheim
-
For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Author:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
-
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Author:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
-
Aggression, the writer's main source of energy.
Author:
Ted Solotaroff
-
Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.
Author:
Walter Smith
-
If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer.
Author:
Patti Smith
-
Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.
Author:
Patti Smith
-
I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I'm such a slow writer.
Author:
Martin Smith
-
The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.
Author:
Martin Smith
-
TV writing is different than other mediums, involving the writer.
Author:
Tom Skerritt
-
Rarely ever see or meet the writer during shooting.
Author:
Tom Skerritt
-
One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray.
Author:
Tom Skerritt
-
As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.
Author:
Tom Skerritt
-
Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try.
Author:
Curtis Sittenfeld
-
The waste basket is the writer's best friend.
Author:
Isaac Singer
-
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
Author:
Isaac Singer
-
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Author:
Isaac Singer
-
Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.
Author:
Paul Simon
-
You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.
Author:
Paul Simon
-
What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it.
Author:
David Simon
-
I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.
Author:
Dan Simmons
-
No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
Author:
Dan Simmons
-
If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
Author:
Shel Silverstein
-
By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.
Author:
Sarah Silverman
-
The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.
Author:
Henryk Sienkiewicz
-
I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.
Author:
Carol Shields
-
I'm a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.
Author:
Sam Shepard
-
I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
Author:
Sam Shepard
-
I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.
Author:
Sidney Sheldon
-
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Author:
Wilfrid Sheed
-
In Europe, a writer is supposed to improve up until he's about 75.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is a citizen of humanity, part of his nation, part of his family. He may have to make some compromises.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
You have to expect the raps when you have achieved popularity as a writer.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
The writer works in a lonely way.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
A writer has to live with a sense of honor.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.
Author:
Irwin Shaw
-
I'm a performer, comedian, entertainer, writer and director.
Author:
William Shatner
-
I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.
Author:
Peter Shaffer
-
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
Author:
Rod Serling
-
If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying.
Author:
Jaroslav Seifert
-
My father was a classical musician and my mother was a writer.
Author:
John Sebastian
-
I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol.
Author:
Steven Seagal
-
The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.
Author:
John Scott
-
Steve Martin is such an exquisite and precise writer. Everything is so clear; it's like a bell. He says what he means and says it so beautifully.
Author:
Jason Schwartzman
-
I really enjoy the writing process because I can do it from my house. I can create these characters and take them in the different directions that I want to take them. You have a lot of freedom as a writer.
Author:
Rick Schroder
-
I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.
Author:
Liev Schreiber
-
Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.
Author:
Bob Schieffer
-
I've basically thought of myself as a writer, whether I was or not.
Author:
Bob Schieffer
-
I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.
Author:
John Sayles
-
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
Author:
Dorothy Sayers
-
I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.
Author:
Carl Sandburg
-
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
Author:
Carl Sandburg
-
I never intended to be a professional writer; as the story developed, the one thing I had in my hopes was that this would be something tangible to separate me from the nameless, numbered masses.
Author:
R. Salvatore
-
It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a writer puts on the face of reality.
Author:
Francoise Sagan
-
The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
Author:
Vita Sackville-West
-
I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.
Author:
Fred Saberhagen
-
The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.
Author:
Fred Saberhagen
-
If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.
Author:
Richard Russo
-
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
Author:
Salman Rushdie
-
Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
Author:
Rudy Rucker
-
The main engagement of the writer is towards truthfulness; therefore he must keep his mind and his judgement free.
Author:
Gabrielle Roy
-
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Author:
Leo Rosten
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The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
Author:
Leo Rosten
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The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Author:
Leo Rosten
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I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer.
Author:
Mick Ronson
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Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.
Author:
Nora Roberts
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Every writer has to figure out what works best - and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits.
Author:
Nora Roberts
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I'm fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don't have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with 'It's a masterpiece,' and then tell me what you think could be changed.
Author:
Tim Robbins
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As a guest who doesn't eat, drink or smoke, you leave much to be desired, but as a writer, you're my girl.
Author:
Thelma Ritter
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The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
Author:
Mordecai Richler
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Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials.
Author:
Mordecai Richler
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That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.
Author:
Anne Rice
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Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.
Author:
Anne Rice
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Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible.
Author:
Anne Rice
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Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.
Author:
Anne Rice
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Nothing would make me happier if Peter Falk would finally win his Oscar for this. Not just as the writer but as a fan and a friend. It would be so great.
Author:
Paul Reiser
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What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
Author:
Burton Rascoe
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I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work.
Author:
Harold Ramis
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The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.
Author:
Salvatore Quasimodo
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It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.
Author:
Manuel Puig
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I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.
Author:
Manuel Puig
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The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.
Author:
Manuel Puig
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Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Author:
Marcel Proust
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Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
Author:
J. Priestley
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I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.
Author:
Richard Price
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To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Author:
Lawrence Powell
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I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.
Author:
Jerry Pournelle
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Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.
Author:
Jerry Pournelle
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The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?
Author:
Jerry Pournelle
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I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
Author:
Ezra Pound
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God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.
Author:
Dennis Potter
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A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
Author:
Chaim Potok
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I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.
Author:
Frederik Pohl
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Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
Author:
Luigi Pirandello
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I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.
Author:
Harold Pinter
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I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
Author:
Daniel Pinkwater
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It was in New York, and I've always wanted to film in New York. And the writer was a teenage friend of mine. We did youth theatre together when we were 16 and always had a dream of making a film together. And ten years later, we've done it. So it's great.
Author:
Rosamund Pike
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The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Author:
Marge Piercy
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I am the worlds laziest writer.
Author:
Oscar Peterson
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Contrary to what many writers imply about the process, nobody forces a writer to sell his work to the film industry.
Author:
Thomas Perry
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It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
Author:
Thomas Perry
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Sean's a great, great writer.
Author:
Robin Penn
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A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
Author:
Charles Peguy
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Inside of all the makeup and the character and makeup, it's you, and I think that's what the audience is really interested in... you, how you're going to cope with the situation, the obstacles, the troubles that the writer put in front of you.
Author:
Gregory Peck
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The main concern of the study is with the outline of a theoretical system. Its minor variations from writer to writer are not a matter of concern to this analysis.
Author:
Talcott Parsons
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It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.
Author:
Trey Parker
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College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner.
Author:
Robert Parker
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You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
Author:
Grace Paley
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I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.
Author:
Cynthia Ozick
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I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.
Author:
Patton Oswalt
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For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
Author:
George Orwell
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It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
Author:
Michael Ondaatje
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As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
Author:
Michael Ondaatje
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A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Author:
Michael Ondaatje
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If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Author:
Mary Oliver
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I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
Author:
Sharon Olds
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It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.
Author:
Gary Oldman
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It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
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The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
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The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
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When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
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The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
Author:
Flannery O'Connor
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If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Author:
Joyce Oates
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So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.
Author:
Trevor Nunn
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I never thought I'd be a writer. I never thought I'd be able to read a book, let alone write one. So if books like this inspire kids to write, or even read a whole book, I think it's good.
Author:
Don Novello
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Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!
Author:
Larry Niven
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It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
Author:
Anais Nin
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The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
Author:
Anais Nin
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A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
Author:
Friedrich Nietzsche
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The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
Author:
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings.
Author:
Stevie Nicks
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I made a conscious decision that I was not going to have children. I didn't want others raising them, and looking after them myself would get in the way of being a musician and writer.
Author:
Stevie Nicks
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Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
Author:
Howard Nemerov
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I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Author:
V. Naipaul
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I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
Author:
V. Naipaul
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
Author:
V. Naipaul
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Author:
Vladimir Nabokov
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I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.
Author:
Haruki Murakami
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A writer can write in an attic, or on top of a bus. Or with a sharp stick in some wet cement. To act, an actor has to have words. A stage. a camera turning.
Author:
Paul Muni
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At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
Author:
Walter Mosley
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When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.
Author:
Willie Morris
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What I try to keep in mind is that there are going to be a lot of articles that are going to be misrepresentative of what I'm about as a person and as a writer.
Author:
Alanis Morissette
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If a lecturer, he wishes to be heard; if a writer, to be read. He always hopes for a public beyond that of the long-suffering wife.
Author:
Samuel Morison
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I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.
Author:
Robert Morgan
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Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
Author:
Robert Morgan
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A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
Author:
Marianne Moore
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Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
Author:
Marianne Moore
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If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
Author:
Marianne Moore
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When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.
Author:
Brian Moore
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So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.
Author:
Rick Moody
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It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.
Author:
Rick Moody
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To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.
Author:
Colin Mochrie
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Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.
Author:
Vincente Minnelli
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You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.
Author:
Anthony Minghella
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No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not.
Author:
John Milius
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I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
Author:
James Michener
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I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
Author:
James Michener
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As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.
Author:
Nicholas Meyer
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I still can't quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time.
Author:
Sam Mendes
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I'm a fast writer.
Author:
Terry McMillan
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I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else.
Author:
Sarah McLachlan
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The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
Author:
Bryant McGill
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I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.
Author:
John McGahern
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I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.
Author:
Colleen McCullough
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It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.
Author:
Colleen McCullough
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There's a feminist writer, Naomi Wolfe, who is reconsidering her position on abortion.
Author:
Norma McCorvey
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I didn't raise Todd to be a writer, but he happened to be one anyway.
Author:
Anne McCaffrey
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The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.
Author:
Anne McCaffrey
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First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
Author:
James McBride
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Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.
Author:
Joyce Maynard
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I can't imagine a more fulfilling thing for a writer than that you've made a strong impact on the lives of other people. Just because I've heard it before does not mean I don't want to hear it one more time.
Author:
Armistead Maupin
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It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
Author:
W. Maugham
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The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
Author:
W. Maugham
