Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I don't try to be satirical. I just try to get what's in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don't. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that's how any process works.

I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

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.

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

I don't even know how to define myself. I'm a person who writes. It's something I enjoy, and hopefully people enjoy it as well.

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.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.