Dorothy Parker Quotes

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.

I can draw pencil lines to show something is moving, but if I'm writing, I struggle with how to write it. The boy ran down the hallway? The boy ran quickly down the hallway? The boy ran down the marble hallway? I agonize over the words. So my editor works very hard. I'm lucky to have her.

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing.

Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.

Writing, overall, has never been what I'd call fun. It's fulfilling. It doesn't come real easy for me.

For me, writing is really an agony. I feel as if I have a huge, luminous idea that has the potential to be really profound, and then when I set it down on paper, I find the power of the idea has been hugely weakened in the process of transmission.

Writing is just always hard for me. It always feels like drawing blood. It's never particularly easy.

But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

You know, many writers really don't like to write. I think this the chief complaint of so many. They hate to write; they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist the victim he is, but they loathe the process of sitting down trying to turn thoughts into reasonable sentences.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

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

I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.

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

It must be a hellish thing to know what's possible in music, to be hearing things all the time and not have an appropriate outlet for them.

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

I like writing, but it really can be a struggle for me.

I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.

I have a lot of respect for people who write a whole book because I've heard it will kill you.

I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.