Leon Uris Quotes

For writing stand-up, I have to have a little bit of anger and frustration to be motivated to do it. Stand-up, for me, comes from kind of a hostile engine.

I think being angry is what keeps me motivated.

When I'm angry, when I've got something to fight for, I'm charged up.

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.

I'm mad, you know? I don't think of retiring at all.

They said I would never write this book. Well, f**k ’em – ’cos here it is. All I have to do now is remember something... Bollocks. I can’t remember anything.

Why you don't wanna let him talk? You mad, you maaad, you maaaaad.

Some of my stuff, I realize is just rage.

If anger were mileage, I'd be a very frequent flyer, right up there in First Class.

Writing is like pulling your hair out. You have nothing, and you can't think of anything, but you have to think of something.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

Anger is a passion, so it makes people feel alive and makes them feel they matter and are in charge of their lives. So people often need to renew their anger a long time after the cause of it has died, because it is a protection against helplessness and emptiness just like howling in the night. And it makes them feel less vulnerable for a little while.

That was the trouble with being a writer, that was the main trouble—leisure time, excessive leisure time. You had to wait around for the buildup until you could write and while you were waiting you went crazy, and while you were going crazy you drank and the more you drank the crazier you got.

Frustration is not the way to go.

I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Writing is flat, so if you only have part of one eye working, you still can do the job. It's just that you sit there and you're angry, which doesn't help.

Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.

Percy pushed on his side furiously and the crack closed. His eyes blazed with anger. She hoped he wasn’t mad at her, but if he was she couldn’t blame him. If it keeps him going, she thought, then let him be angry.