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Quotes about writing

After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.

—George Ade

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No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

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Television has raised writing to a new low.

—Samuel Goldwyn

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A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

—Thomas Mann

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All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

—Bobby Knight

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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

—Joan Didion

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I have twenty-one pages, unusable, unprintable, destructive of the book as my mind still partly sees it, contradictory of character and inconsistent in tone. But I am undoubtedly started.

—Janet Burroway

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I have spent a good many years . . . being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

—Stephen King

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I lived in the midst of an affectionate, charming family, and I am sure that there is no greater obstacle to a person who is just beginning to write.

—Katharine Butler Hathaway

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Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

—Jessamyn West

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The good thing about writing fiction is that you can get back at people. I've gotten back at lawyers, prosecutors, judges, law professors, and politicians. I just line 'em up and shoot 'em.

—John Grisham

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He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

—Charles Bukowski

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Writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

—Kurt Vonnegut

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I am dissatisfied with everything I have ever written and regard it all only as a preparation for that one work which probably I don't have it in me to write but which I hope I can go on trying for.

—Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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All writing, even the clumsy kind, exposes in its loops and slants a yearning deeper than an intention, the soul of the writer flopping on the clothes-peg of his exclamation mark.

—Paul Theroux

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