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Paddy Chayevsky: “Stop thinking of writing as art.”

26 Jan

Chayefsky

“Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s to stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.”

~ PADDY CHAYEFSKY

 

January 26th birthday: Eddie Van Halen

26 Jan

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“It’s always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you’re the same, and they hate you if you’re different.”

~ Eddie Van Halen, b. 26 Jan 1955

 

Tom Clancy: “Success is a finished book.”

25 Jan

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“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.”

~ TOM CLANCY

 

January 25th birthday: Virginia Woolf

25 Jan

Virginia Woolf

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

~ Virginia Woolf, b. 25 January 1882

Ray Bradbury: “You must write every single day of your life.”

24 Jan

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“To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

~ RAY BRADBURY

 

January 24th birthday: Edith Wharton

24 Jan

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“Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”

~ Edith Wharton, b. 24 January 1862

 

Mark Twain: “…You want them all to land in hell…”

23 Jan

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“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.”

~ MARK TWAIN

January 23rd birthday: Django Reinhardt

23 Jan

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“Jazz attracted me with its formal perfection & instrumental precision – admirable in classical music, but lacking in popular music.”
~ Django Reinhardt, b. 23 January 1910

 

Ben Bova: “More fantastic the tale, plainer the prose.”

22 Jan

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“In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don’t ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.”

~ BEN BOVA

 

January 22nd birthday: Michael Hutchence

22 Jan

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“It’s just as difficult to live in a self-made hell of privacy as it is to live in a self-made hell of publicity.”
~ Michael Hutchence, b. 22 January 1960