Fred Saberhagen Quotes

I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.

I'm certainly afraid of not being able to write for some reason. I guess I've had spells of not necessarily writer's block, but something like that. I find that pretty terrifying.

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 don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.

When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

If you make your living writing, and you can't write anything, it's over. It's very frightening.

But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks.

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

I think we're so often, as writers, afraid of writing something that is less than perfect, and that fear paralyzes us. I'm a big fan of writing less than perfect things.

I think I'm a good joke writer. I'm also very scared that the last joke I wrote is the last joke I'll ever write.

I'm into lately being a little less precious about writing and being like, "Okay, what if I just locked myself in my room, pretend that there's someone outside with a gun that's saying, 'Don't come out until you write something.'"

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.

I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.

As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.

It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.

Creating the characters is the most creative part of the novel except for the language itself. There I am, sitting in front of my computer in right-brain mode, typing the things that come to mind - which become the seeds of plot. It's scary, though, because I always wonder: Is it going to be there this time?

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.