Fiona Apple Quotes

The idea of writer's block or not having inspiration is totally terrifying to me.

It's weird, because I don't feel prolific. I don't write anything for months at a time.

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

In 2012, I really thought, 'That's it. It's over. I've written what I can write.'

As for the reasons behind my retirement, they mostly center around simple fatigue and a fear that if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer, or at the very least ease into the graveyard of mediocre cartoons.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to... There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block.' For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.

Sometimes when you're heavy into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you don't know if you could ever do it again.

One of the things I try to be very careful of is not taking a movie when I know I have no inspiration left.

I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the problem is.

I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.

Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?

I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses.

Every day I wake up afraid that I won't be able to write, that today is the day it has left me.

I think in my late 20s, I was starting to enter that realm of complacency, which is the most terrifying place I can imagine as an artist. I felt time creeping up on me.

I go through long periods of time when I don't write, and I'm fine.

Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.

Success can be destructive to the creative process. I say it all the time: success is as dangerous as total failure.

That's always the time to quit - when you have nothing to say as an artist and creative person.

The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

You can only be independently creative for so long until your brain burns out.