The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.
quote by Russell Banks

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I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
quote by Doris Lessing

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Paperback Writer
(LennonMcCartney)
Paperback writer
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer
It's the dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn't understand
His son is working for the Daily Mail
It's a steady job but he wants to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer
Paperback writer
It's a thousand pages, give or take a few
I'll be writing more in a week or two
I can make it longer if you like the style
I can change it round and I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer
If you really like it you can have the rights
It could make a million for you overnight
If you must return it, you can send it here
But I need a break and I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer
Paperback writer
Paperback writer, paperback writer
Paperback writer, paperback writer
Paperback writer, paperback writer
Paperback writer, paperback writer (fade out)
song performed by by Paul McCartney

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To be a writer
They say, when you have nothing to say
Do not say anything
They say when you have nothing good to say
Do not say anything
He is not convinced
He wants to be a writer and to be one he must write
What is in his mind
To be a writer he must write and write and write
Even when there is nothing to write
Even when there is nothing to say even when nobody listens
Even when the word is dead even when there is no sense at all
Even when he gets blind and deaf and mute even when his fingers are cut even when his mind is blank even when his consciousness is lost
Even when you are angry even when you say what is written is nothing
But trash, dung, cadaver, corpse, poo, pee, even when there is nothing
Anymore,
He writes because he is a writer and no one can stop him now.
he is
he is writing
he is writing always
he is writing always whatever that needs to be written
and here you are foolishly reading. thanks to you, audience of one.
poem by Ric S. Bastasa

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Great writing is a submission to a creative force that seems to use the writer as an instrument. The writer finds that the words stream out, almost as if someone else were producing them. Writing becomes a process of discovery.
quote by S. O'Brien

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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.
But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.
quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

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Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
quote by Katherine Anne Porter

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Mahatma Gandhi is a writer
He who writes is not a writer.
He whose writing has been his life
And who has made his life his writing
Is he who only is called a writer.
13.12.2009
poem by Rm. Shanmugam Chettiar

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If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.
quote by Irwin Shaw

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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
quote by Flannery O'Connor

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At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.
quote by Peter Maxwell Davies

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When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.
quote by Margaret Haddix

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The serious thing about poetry
The serious thing about poetry
Is the 'serious thing about poetry'
It is not in the writing but the reading
We define it!
We who did not write it
Or know the serious thing about poetry
Is in the 'business of writing'
In the silent inflections and reflections
In the silence
Just the silence
And the space
And the writer
Writing
First feeling
First breathing
First yet not first
Then recalling
In diary
On dictaphone
While alone
In a crowd
In a park
Round the back of the track of
The old garden, where you used to play
Taking your time
Walking the long way home
With your head full of books
Your book, full of thoughts
And the serious business
Yes the serious business of 'Art'
In the making...
Making or a name?
The serious thing remains
Afterward untouched
Always the same
After the awards
They all went home
And some hung their OSCARS in the loo
And some feeling foolish hung their heads in shame
For the sake of the art
For arts sake
Finding still trying to find whose to blame?
yvette m smith 7.2.09
poem by Yvette Smith

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The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
quote by Russell Baker

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I learned one thing in Watergate: I was well-intentioned but rationalized illegal behavior,"" he said. ""You cannot live your life other than walking in the truth. Your means are as important as your ends.
quote by Chuck Colson

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If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.
quote by Quentin Tarantino

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A Mirror Image
How many times when reading a book,
do we identify with the characters within?
Their traits they have we share,
their loves and heartaches
their lives go through somehow mirror our own.
It’s as if the author was writing about us.
As though he has put us under a microscope
and then writing down everything, he saw.
However, we know this isn’t so
because he or she has written
segments of their own life
and by accident they happen to mirror ours.
Every writer will tell you
that they have their characters under control.
Having written numerous novels,
I know the characters take on a life of their own
and do what they want to do.
We become their instrument as they guide us on our way.
We end up writing what they want us to say.
To every writer his characters are real,
they live, breathe and feel.
The more you write about them,
the more alive they become.
So the next time you pick up a book
and the characters seem real,
they probably are to the author
who looks after them.
24 September 2008
poem by David Harris

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For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.
quote by Gay Talese

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All These Things
Sometimes I don’t feel who I am.
I don’t feel like what I write
because I don’t want to be pigeonholed
for just one thing I do.
I think myself as a whole
and not just one object.
I call myself a writer,
not a poet,
not a novelist,
neither a songwriter
nor a short story writer be.
I am a writer
because all those things
emulate from within me.
10 April 2009
poem by David Harris

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