Winifred Holtby Quotes

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

Writing never had the immediate gratification I was looking for.

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.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

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

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.

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

I'm never happy with what I've written. You imagine, before you start, there's a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it's a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.

I need therapy after writing. It's like leaking blood from a stone. It's brutally difficult but worth it.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

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

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

It is horrible to sit in front of the keyboard and write those scenes because you're losing too. You lose somebody you enjoy working with.

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?

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.

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.