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My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.

Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 8
Author
Columnist
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Anna Marie Quindlen
Write
Writing
Trying
Pronounced
Habit

More quotes by Anna Quindlen

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I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.
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My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.
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Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self that's why it survives
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Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.
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It's what the Taliban does in Afghanistan, it's what gets done in the Middle East, and it's clearly something that certain mainly conservative groups in the United States would like to do. They miss the good old days, when men were men and women were nothing.
Anna Quindlen
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I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.
Anna Quindlen
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Prosecutors insist they are mounting a thorough investigation, which sometimes means thorough and sometimes, historically, has meant long enough to let the fire burn down in an incendiary case. A thorough investigation is fine an interminable one is disgraceful.
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the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.
Anna Quindlen
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America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
Anna Quindlen
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The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?
Anna Quindlen
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Fifty years ago, teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins.
Anna Quindlen
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The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.
Anna Quindlen
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I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.
Anna Quindlen
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If I waited long enough and said, Okay, so what you're saying is you liked your life a lot better when you were 30? everybody would get real quiet and then admit that that wasn't the case, that they really felt like they were sort of growing into themselves in a way.
Anna Quindlen
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London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
Anna Quindlen
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London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
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The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.
Anna Quindlen
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Some of the most important lessons I've learned have been from stumbling, and I am deeply grateful that my parents allowed me to fight my own battles.
Anna Quindlen
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Each instance of sexual harassment has to be judged on its merits. Facts, timing, motives, credibility: all must be considered before we make up our own minds what to believe.
Anna Quindlen
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Today is the only guarantee you get.
Anna Quindlen