C. Day Lewis Quotes

I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I can't really describe writing. It's in my head.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

I write what's given me to write.