Purpose Of Writing Quotes

• Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

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  William Carlos Williams

  Writing   Reality   Imagination  

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• The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.

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  J. P. Donleavy

  Mother   Father   Writing  

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• The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

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  Bill Watterson

  Writing   Fog   Practice  

  "Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat". Book by Bill Watterson, October 1994.

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• What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

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  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing   Political   Purpose  

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• Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.” (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

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  Jonathan Franzen

  Loneliness   Writing   Years  

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• The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.

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  William Saroyan

  Running   Loneliness   Kids  

  "My Heart's in the Highlands". Book by William Saroyan, 1939.

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• The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

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  John Mason Brown

  Writing   Vanity   Mirrors  

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• Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.

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  Henning Mankell

  Believe   Book   Writing  

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• The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

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  Berry Gordy

  Book   Writing   People  

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• What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

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  John Cage

  Writing   Order   Play  

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