Fran Lebowitz Quotes

I have written, and I do write, but the truth is I don't love it. I can't stand the process!

I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.

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

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Writing is a very strenuous thing - it's like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer's room.

The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.

I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war.

Writing has never been that simple for me.

I can't write things. I'm embarrassed all the time about that, particularly if people don't know that about me.

Writing is agony. I hate it.

I'm so terrified to write that I don't type at all.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

So much of school, you have to write, but I just struggled. I couldn't help it.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.

In a way I do hate the process of writing. It's like learning a role where you never think you're going to be able to conquer it when you start and it just takes enough focus and narrowing and getting enthusiastic and not losing it and so on. It's never good enough, but you aim for something and you hope it comes somewhat close. But it is a pleasure once you have written it.

A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks - chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.

A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . .

I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'.

I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.