Alexandra Fuller Quotes

I find writing extraordinarily difficult and not very pleasurable, though I find having done it very pleasurable. I won't lie about that.

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

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

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.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

I continue to wish that writing were easier, that it would flow out completely perfect with no need for revisions.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

Each time, I think I'm never going to write another book. It never gets easier.

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.

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

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.

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.

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.

I'm envious of writers and musicians. I think it must be so difficult. Not just the frustration, but the discipline.

I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.