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

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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.

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Doris Lessing

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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Quentin Tarantino

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

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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

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For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.

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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 HarrisReport problemRelated quotes
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