Anita Shreve Quotes

For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go to work. Or, come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

I am a morning writer; I am writing at eight-thirty in longhand and I keep at it until twelve-thirty, when I go for a swim. Then I come back, have lunch, and read in the afternoon until I take my walk for the next day's writing.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.

The hardest part is making the time to write. Not finding the time to write, mind you. Making.

I'm not the most talented writer in the world. I know that. But I also know that I'm disciplined, that I work my butt off, and that I make myself write as much as I can. Writer's block is a luxury I can't afford. I'm a professional writer, which means that I put my butt in the chair each day, and I write. Simple as that.

I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.

People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.

When I'm writing, which is 8-9 months out of the year, I'm in a concerted writing pace, where I work 5 days a week for at least a few hours a day, maybe a little bit more. But I won't work for more than 2 hours at a time. I'll work for a couple hours and take a break.

I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

I write every day.

I just write from dawn to dusk.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

People always ask, 'How do you write so many books?' And I say, I work a lot. I work six or seven days a week.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I make time to write.

You don't find time to write. You make time. It's my job.

Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.

I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.