Laurence Sterne Quotes

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.

When I write I'm never really thinking about themes or the universal.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.

Never regret what you don't write.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

Whatever's going on in my life shows up in the writing room.

I think we writers are very superstitious. We don't know why it's working when it's working, so we attach cause and effect.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

Just start writing and you'll find what you want to say.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.