Stewart Lee Quotes

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

When I finished a song that I thought was good, I thought, I don't know where that came from, so I have no idea if I can do that again. I'm talking like, a hundred and fifty songs down the line. I still feel that.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

I wrote 'Show Me the Way' in the morning and wrote 'Baby, I Love Your Way' in the afternoon of the same day. I've been trying to figure out what I ate for breakfast that morning ever since!

I feel like I spend most of my time in a state of writer's block! When things do come out, they come out quickly.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

I've gone periods of maybe four months without writing anything, but it's not a problem. It just means something's building inside you, and it'll build and it'll build, and at some point it'll come out, and it does, and it usually comes out in three or four songs, and you play it that way, really.

Everybody knows that I don't have a muse. I'm not interested in that.

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

I go through cycles with my writing. I have cycles where I'm up all night and lose track of time, and then I go for months without a thing to write about. My song 'So Good, So Right' came to me while I was washing dishes after a dinner party.

But it's like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now!

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

We all have fertile creative periods and times when we can't figure out how we ever did 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.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.

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.

I've learnt that the muse is like an angry girlfriend. If she comes knocking you better be home because if you're not, she doesn't leave a note saying pick up after 3 P. M. from the post office. The gift she had is gone forever.

Songwriting was very tough for me... I would go in and sit and hope for inspiration to come, and it was rarely forthcoming.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.