Larry Wall Quotes

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

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

Writing is such a weird emotional thing. It's hard. If you sit down with a plan to write something, it's going to be harder.

Writing is the most frustrating, but it's something that I've always done.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

I've always said the hardest aspect of the job of being a writer is writing.

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 love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.

My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know great writers who find the process agonising but to me, writing has always been sheer joy.

Writing a book is an emotional odyssey, sometimes exhilarating, other times deflating.

Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.

I'm not a poet. So the writing process is a difficult one for me.

I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.