Annie Baker Quotes

There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.

I've never liked songs that are about writing, or struggling to write. Maybe it's because it's too relatable to me.

I know a lot about words. I get paid to write stories, so I get to talk with people about the meaning behind words all day.

The stressful time is the blank page at the beginning. When you're starting to see things being made flesh, and you're able to respond to that flesh, that's really exciting.

I'm not a poet. So the writing process is a difficult one for me.

Little Christian Bale. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and I re-watched it not too long ago, and my jaw just hit the floor. The whole time I was like, "Who wrote this? This is unbelievable." And then the credits came up at the end and it was Tom Stoppard, my favorite playwright. It's just an amazing piece of writing.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

I find it incredibly difficult to write anything that's really happy.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

Writing is difficult. It's a time commitment, it's labor and I'd have to get myself to sit down and actually do the work and outline.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

I can't write. I would love to. I don't really have an interest in it, to be honest. I'll leave that to my fiance.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

Writing an op-ed feels like I'm taking the SAT. It's so hard. It feels like homework. And if it feels like homework, it just doesn't get done.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.

The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

The only people who can be excused for letting a bad book loose on the world are the poor devils who have to write for a living.

I just don't know how to stitch words in a predictable way sometimes. It's a weird instinct I've developed.

I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.