Quotes
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“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.” –Janet Frame This is such a beautiful quote from Janet Frame that I knew it was going to be my quote…
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“Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.” -J.B. Priestley Naturally, it’s nearly every author’s dream to be published. While I’m sure there are a few authors out there who really mean it when they say that they write just…
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“The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.” ~Isaac Bashevis Singer I would actually give this quote a follow-up quote from myself. The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend, and a writer is a tree’s worst enemy. As someone on the cusp of completely scraping (well, not scrapping in the literal sense, as I imagine I’ll…
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“The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.” -J.W. Goethe …or stories, for that matter. I love this quote so incredibly much. Everyone who reads me regularly knows about my affliction with W.A.D.D., making it pretty damn hard for me to be…
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“It is perfectly okay to write garbage–as long as you edit brilliantly.” -C.H. Cherryh I’ve been doing a lot of editing and digging up old pieces and trying to make them sparkle and shiny and new again, so quotes about editing in particular have been appealing to me lately. Mostly because, while I’m editing, anything…
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“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” -E.L. Doctorow Maybe it’s just that I’m not quite awake yet this morning (one of the risks of being a morning blogger!); maybe I just haven’t had…
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“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” -Ernest Hemingway. Searching for a quote this morning because my brain feels far too dull to come up with anything creative to post today (although that should change in…
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“I’m one of those writers who, when writing, believes she’s god-and that she hasn’t bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.” -Lynn Abbey I chose this quote today because it’s the complete opposite of how I feel when I write, and that…
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“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” -Henry David Thoreau. I am a firm believer that there is no one way in which a person can or should write, but one of the more interesting methods followed by man is the idea that you…
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“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt” -Sylvia Plath. This quote from Sylvia Plath touched on two things I’ve been feeling a lot of recently. The first reminds me of the…
L.S. Engler 