Monty Don Quotes

When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

When I can't write, it depresses me.

I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

Some days, you will sit down, and you write tens of thousands of words. Others, you have to force yourself to write a single sentence.

The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get.

I feel there is this looming cloud over my life.

I write good songs out of fear... fear of failure. Because if they're not good enough, you feel yourself starting to fall.

I'm not really worried about writer's block.

But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.

My anxiety level of my own work and what I'm doing and focusing on my art and all of that stuff? That's fundamental.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

I wrote 'Criminal' in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me.

Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.

When you're an artist, there's always a moment in your life when you think you're not inspired and instead of doing things and instead of travel and instead of falling in love, you're just depressed, so you don't move, so you don't change. So you're not inspired.

The challenge in my life really is keeping the balance between feeling creatively energized and fulfilled without feeling overwhelmed and like I'm in the middle of a battlefield.

I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

Every movie I do, I always use things that have happened in my life. Funny moments, anything. If it just sticks out I'll write it down and use that, too, because it has to come out of you. But no one can work when they're depressed. I don't think I'd physically be able to do it if I were depressed.

Sometimes on sets, I shut down, try to focus.

Some people thrive under pressure, but pressure can also ruin your performance, it can push you down angles which you don't want to go.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.