A Quote by David Mamet

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.
If you get trapped in your head and out of your body during the writing process, it's very easy to make wrong turns. You have to really be in touch with your heart rather than your head to write the novel you want.
Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing’s quality and your productivity.
If you dared to put your opinion into a factual piece, your editors said, "You can't do this. Write an op-ed."
My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppy, had us each write a 'novel,' whatever that meant to us. It must have been 10 pages long, and we bound it and colored the front. And she wrote on mine, 'I can't wait till your real novel comes out. Give me a call.'
If you're going to write about rap music and hip-hop, and you don't love it, then we don't need your opinion, and we revoke your opinion.
Because others cannot vibrate in your experience, they cannot affect the outcome of your experience. They can hold their opinions, but unless their opinion affects your opinion, their opinion matters not at all. A million people could be pushing against you, and it would not negatively affect you unless you push back. They are affecting what happens in their experience. They are affecting their point of attraction - but it does not affect you unless you push against them.
Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.
Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.
When you go through life ... it all seems accidental at the time it is happening. Then when you get on in your 60s or 70s and look back, your life looks like a well-planned novel with a coherent theme ... Incidents that seemed accidental, pure chance, turn out to be major elements in the structuring of this novel. Schopenhauer says, 'Who wrote this novel? You did.'
Everyone should have their own opinion and be able to voice it. No matter what it is. Of course, that does not mean your opinion is always right. But, you're certainly entitled to your opinion.
Follow your instincts and do not let other people's opinion of you become your opinion of yourself.
A man should always have these two rules in readiness. First, to do only what the reason of your ruling and legislating faculties suggest for the service of man. Second, to change your opinion whenever anyone at hand sets you right and unsettles you in an opinion, but this change of opinion should come only because you are persuaded that something is just or to the public advantage, not because it appears pleasant or increases your reputation.
Somebody said, 'Hey, there is a lull in your career. Why don't you write books about your [dyslexia]?' We are currently writing our 34th novel.
Many of us are taught to be ladies and keep our opinions to ourselves. But you can be completely railroaded if you don't make your point known by giving your opinion and speaking up.
We all want to make money and have a good life. But if your passion is writing, and you want to write a novel, I don't think you should sit in your home and wait for someone to give you the opportunity. You write it.
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