Corey Taylor Quotes

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.

Writing a book is an emotional odyssey, sometimes exhilarating, other times deflating.

I spent six years after my first novel and five years after my second without getting into a new book.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

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.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.