Paul Valery Quotes

Writing is a difficult thing.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.

Well I don't write, I attempt to scribble here and there. And no, nothing ever so grand as being published.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way, and you know you're not quite there, and you're redoing it and redoing it, and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. It's a job of tremendous anxiety for me.

Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.

Writing is hard - writing is the hardest.

I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.

It would probably take me an hour to two to write it down, get the feel of it, and that's with quite a few changes. It's not really a hard thing for me to do.

I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.

Writing is hard, hard work; that's just the way it is.

I write very slowly.

It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.

I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me - but the process of actually crafting it is essential.

As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.

A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides.