Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.

It's not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that's the craft that you're doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books.

I write every night.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy that kind of process.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

I like being a writer.

You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.