Writing Life Quotes - Page 4

• All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Impulse

  "A Personal 'Report From The Interior' Of Author Paul Auster". "All Things Considered" with Arun Rath, www.npr.org. December 15, 2013.

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• When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.

  James Franco

  Writing, Careers, People

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• Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Writing, Vanity, Cells

  Logan Pearsall Smith (1931). “Afterthoughts”

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• Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.

  Paul Theroux

  Book, Writing, Marketing

  "Fiction in the Age of E-Books". "The Atlantic" Interview, www.theatlantic.com. 2010.

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• Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

  Thomas McGuane

  Writing, Scary, Literature

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• Writing is the great invention of the world.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Writing, Great Inventions, World

  Abraham Lincoln (1989). “Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 2: 1859-1865: Library of America #46”, p.7, Library of America

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• A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

  Jane Smiley

  Reading, Writing, Two

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• Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.

  Ken Tucker

  Writing, Generosity, Use

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• But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.

  Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Writing, Down And, Flip

  Jeanne Marie Laskas (2010). “Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm”, p.12, Bantam

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• A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

  Eric Maisel

  Writing, Keys, Long

  Eric Maisel (2006). “A Writer's San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul”, p.128, New World Library

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• Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

  George Eliot

  Life, Writing, Letters

  Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 8 June 1856

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• Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Real, Writing, Use

  Natalie Goldberg (2016). “Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within”, p.53, Shambhala Publications

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• The report of my illness grew out of his (James Clemens) illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration.

  Mark Twain

  Illness, Grew, Exaggeration

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• For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.

  Athol Fugard

  Believe, Writing, Issues

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• But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.

  Orson Scott Card

  Fun, Teaching, Writing

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• The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

  Jayne Anne Phillips

  Writing, Secret, Life Is

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• The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

  Will Self

  Writing, Life Is, Solitary

  "Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)". www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2010.

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• History has to live with what was here,
  clutching and close to fumbling all we had -
  it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
  unlike writing, life never finishes.

  Robert Lowell

  Writing, Dull, Dies

  Robert Lowell (2017). “New Selected Poems”, p.145, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.

  Andre Dubus

  Dad, Father, Writing

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• Never believe that the fiction writing life makes sense.... It's insanity by definition.

  Jo Beverley

  Believe, Writing, Insanity

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• Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about. It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war. We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might be possible with a little self-transformation.

  Sam Hamill

  Powerful, War, Writing

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• For better or worse, most of my writing life has been about people that work behind the scenes. I'm interested in finding extraordinary moments in otherwise normal people.

  Mark Boal

  Writing, Extraordinary Moments, People

  Source: deadline.com

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• I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Writing, Technology, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Life, Writing, Next

  Benjamin Franklin, John Bigelow (2011). “The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself”, p.82, Cambridge University Press

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• Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

  Mark Twain

  Dog, Cat, Simple

  "Mark Twain’s Book of Animals".

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