David Rakoff Quotes

I love writing but it's a real pain. It's a miserable process - very satisfying but very miserable.

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.

I'm never more miserable than when I write, and never more happy than having finished and having it sitting in front of me.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.

Writing has never been that simple for me.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

I don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

I continue to wish that writing were easier, that it would flow out completely perfect with no need for revisions.

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.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Writing is agony. I hate it.