Paulo Coelho Quotes

As a writer, you live in permanent self-doubt; you're on permanent trial.

As for the zone, I always find the zone immediately after I am sure I will never ever find the zone again because it has left me for some other, better writer.

Usually halfway through a book I have a serious depression, so I go on safari on my ranch in South Africa, or fishing off my island in the Seychelles. When I come back and re-read it, I think: 'What was all that about, Smith? It's fine, just get on with it.'

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.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

I'm wired with a little bit of self-loathing, not that kind of self-loathing that paralyzes me, but it's there. The things I'm most loved for are sometimes the things that annoy me, not my favorite stuff, but those flashes of genius moments, they're called, I rarely see them as a one eureka light bulb idea.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

Twiddle-twiddle away at my softly clicky keyboard for a while, making twiddly adjustments all along- and then print what I have twiddled. Glare at the printout and snarl and curse and scribble almost illegibly all over it with a ballpoint pen. Go back to the machine and enter the scribbles. Repeat this procedure until I hate the very meaning of every word I know.

From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied.

Why do I find it hard to write the next line?

I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

Listen, young people, I understand narcissism - clearly. But at least I have the decency to hate myself. And that's what's missing from the young people. They don't have the debilitating self-loathing and the second guessing.

Each book gets harder, each book gets harder and harder. I always feel like crying when I have to write.

Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

You cannot sedate all the things you hate.

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.

He suddenly announced that he could not write any more since "All that I have written seems like straw to me."

I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.

Tyrion wondered what it would be like to have a twin, and decided that he would rather not know. Bad enough to face himself in a looking glass every day.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.