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Lynn Abbey Quote: 'Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense ...'

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I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.
Jess Walter
Tags: Me Think More
Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.
Sam Shepard
Tags: You Think Because
It's important to hold something back, though, because quite frankly my personal life is pretty dull and I don't want to bore people with it.
Matt Lucas
I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.
Taylor Mali
Tags: About More Up
pirate ship dark night storm
Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.


C. S. Forester
Tags: Work Know Most
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
Teju Cole
Tags: Good Think Am
I was writing a third novel when my kids arrived. And I looked at that book about whether these two people would get together, and I thought, 'I don't care! I've got kids!'
Ron Carlson
Tags: People About Get
I always feel that I am writing for somebody who is bright but impatient. Someone who doesn't have unlimited time. That is my sense of the reader. So I have got to get to the point.
Alain de Botton
Tags: Time Who Get
The stage and working in front of a camera are two completely different mediums. Each requires different techniques.
Tamara Tunie
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When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.


William Gibson
There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.
Kazuo Ishiguro
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Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.


Bernard Malamud
It was not until I had graduated from college that I made a professional commitment to it. Frankly, I didn't think it wise. I was my own interior parental force, and it's very difficult to justify a profession as a dancer.
Twyla Tharp
Tags: Think Very Had
Frankly, I would not have made any difference in Vietnam, but much more is what difference it would have made in me.
Newt Gingrich
Tags: Me More Would
I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.
Carol Windley
Tags: You Me Like
I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.
Paul Di Filippo
Tags: Who More Than
However, lifestyle intervention requires discipline with a tangible end result that is within reach. It requires personal resolve, a lifelong commitment.
Tim Holden
Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.
Julian Baggini
Tags: You About Our
Rather than dull our consciences to the unmitigated violence of abortion, the passage of time has only enabled us to see and, frankly, better understand the innate cruelty of abortion and its horrific legacy - victims - while making us more determined than ever to protect the weakest and the most vulnerable.
Chris Smith
Tags: Time More Our
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A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.


Mohsin Hamid