Sylvia Plath Quotes

I, like a lot of people who are creative, need to step away. I can't have stuff to write about if I don't have a life. If I talk to people, hang out with my friends and hang out with my husband, I feel like I have better things to bring to the table.

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

As I experience life and go through things, that's what I write about.

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation's almost the same. I'm kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan.

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

The best place to find material is in real life. I've always maintained that it's not until the mid-20s that you have enough of a life to draw from. There's nothing better for a comic than to go through some bad stuff - and some good stuff, like getting married.

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.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It's only when you experience life can you emote it.

My stories are never quite good enough.

I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn't have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.

At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, through practice and experience and determination, you will get to the end.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

Anything that's really made an impact on my life, I want to get in the studio and write about it.

I've been around many different lives, many different voices. It was amazing material for a writer.

I'd say to anyone trying to break into the business, 'Don't just be interested in movies. Be interested in life. Be a person. Be in touch.'

I had nothing to talk about until I, like, lived.

I love people that kind of have those life experiences that take them different places.

the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.