A Quote by Joseph Heller

I can't start writing until I have a closing line.

Joseph Heller

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Closing Line Start Until Writing

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Joseph Heller
American - Writer
May 1, 1923 - December 12, 1999

When I'm recording, which is synonymous with writing, I'll play things over and over again until it sounds like I've got the right guitar part. Whereas I think, as the much younger player I tended to do things much more consciously. I didn't wait for the moment where inspiration might strike. That's what I do now. I wait for it to naturally start to replay itself in my mind. As I say, I don't force it. So I like to think of myself as a receiver. I'm a telephone line to who knows where, but until I hear it through that receiver, I don't usually do it. It's got to start writing itself somehow.

Steve Hackett

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

Steve Martin

I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

Deborah Moggach

I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.

Junot Diaz

I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.

Samantha Shannon

I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.

Claire Tomalin

I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.

Jesmyn Ward

I didn't start singing and writing songs properly until I was 19.

Tom Walker

I didn't start writing with band arrangements until I was working on 'Tramp.'

Sharon Van Etten

There isn't a grand plan at work in the progression of the books with respect to the line. I do want the books to be different from each other, certainly, but I'm more aware of that on the level of theme or structure. I can tell when I'm writing the last of a particular type of poem because the writing is too easy and I start to feel queasy.

Matthea Harvey

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on

Louis L'Amour

I'm a really slow writer. What I need to start writing on any given day, is a kernel, a line of dialogue, anything I can sense concretely.

Diana Gabaldon

In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.

Adam Grant

I find dictating in the mass media particularly good because you're writing for voice anyway; you're writing for people to say a line and, consequently, saying a line through a machine is quite a valid test for the validity of what you're saying.

Rod Serling

A Quote by Joseph Heller

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