Lincoln Child Quotes

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

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

Writing has got to be some of the hardest work I know.

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

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'.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

It takes me ages to write stuff.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

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

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

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.