Jenny Zhang Quotes

In 2006, when I had come very close to calling my agent and telling him I needed to take a break, NaNoWriMo was where I found my inspiration again.

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

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.

I'm not sure I know how to make music anymore. Maybe you're given a window into things for a time, and beyond that maybe it goes away. Why should you expect it to stay?

I also just accept that I might never want to write a song again.

Well, I just think through your career you go through different phases, and I just got sort of uninspired by the whole studio process of making and releasing films.

I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore.

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.

In the afternoon, it's impossible to put down any new words. I don't even try.

I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material. To me it's black and white. When there's a song there's a song, when there's not there's not.

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.

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

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

Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.

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.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered.

The album 'Physicist,' I erased all the work that I had done halfway through. I think that's probably why that contributed to that album being sort of sub-par for me, just because by the time I had to go back and do it, I was just over it.

For years and years, I would sit in my studio, and I wouldn't have any inspiration. I'd write one or two songs a year.

Three hours of creating is taxing on any brain, and you should stop there. Some days, you may stop without any words at all. It's much easier to write new stuff the next day than to go through painful deletions of a day's worth of crap you already wrote.

I can make something for a long time and just not come up with an ending. It's finishing things that I don't enjoy.

I guess all bands get to that point where they run out of inspiration and just get bored with the chemistry.

Beauty breeds beauty; truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.

I don't want to be seen in every second film. I don't want the audience to say, 'Oh no, she's in this one too.'

If you're struggling and you just get a sense when you're writing that you might be running out of ideas, that's when I think you should walk away.