Jay Griffiths Quotes

Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.

I kind of like to write fast. It keeps the pacing up. And it keeps me off the streets.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a 'rate of production,' for whom it's a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.

Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

I write 2,000 words a day when I write. It sometimes takes three hours, it sometimes takes five hours.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

I write very slowly.

I'm a very slow writer.

I'm a person who, when I set out to write, I write. It's just like when you set out to eat, you eat, or when you set out to sleep, you sleep. I don't do somersaults to write something. I just do it.

I'm not a speed writer. I write slowly and revise obsessively. The end result tends to be good. That's where my strength is.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

I can write a book in probably three months.

How can you stop writing?

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'