Virginia Woolf Quotes

If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.

I didn't have the time to literally write and draw the strip at the same time.

I'm not particularly prolific.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

Whenever I can squeeze it in, I'm writing and recording.

I'm really happy when I'm actively creating things. When I'm frustrated and not excited, it's because I haven't written anything in a month or so.

It's hard to get to the point where you feel motivated and energized to go back in and create new music when you feel like you've just drained yourself by pouring everything you have into the previous project. It would be nice sometimes to take a longer break in between projects.

I just write when the bell rings. I don't have time to wait for inspiration.

He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit.

When I'm supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write.

I worked more intensively hour after hour when I was starting out [writing]. More laboriously. I'd say quantity is important as well as quality, and if you're not producing enough, make a schedule and stick to it.

Writing is difficult. It's a time commitment, it's labor and I'd have to get myself to sit down and actually do the work and outline.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible.

Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn't mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it's just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time.

Writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another.

I have a few methods that I use. One of them that kind of works but is a bit a boring is that I lock myself in the studio and I have four hours to work and come up with stuff. If nothing's sticking in four hours, then I can stop.

There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

There's only so much artistic output that I can actually expel at any one given time.

I don't have the patience to sit and write.

I can focus on writing, or I can get lost in wonderfully fun but endless conversations and produce nothing new at all. I count on those people who enjoy my work to understand this.

I procrastinate, and I push writing to the last available moment, because I don't like to settle on anything. I guess you can call it indecision or you can call it holding out for inspiration.