Lawrence Block Quotes

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

I hate writing.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.

Sometimes, if I don't write for a day or two, I get backed up - it's like constipation.

I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write, because that tends to be a little forced.

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

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

If I was going to write something, I'd need to stop for three months and just see if I had any thoughts in there.

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.

By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.

I write just knowing that I enjoy writing. But if I have to write, it seems like nothing comes. But when I go there for my own pleasure, the Lord might just give me loads of stuff all at once.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

I feel like some sort of fiction-writing hobo, jumping trains and always hoping I'll find a good place to start a fire in the next town. And I keep having these panicky episodes where I corner my husband and rant at him: 'I don't have anywhere to write! I can't write! I don't have a place to write!'

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

I've been taking longer to write stories lately.

I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.