Tobias Forge Quotes

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

The muse holds no appointments. You can never call on it. I don't understand people who get up at 9 o'clock in the morning, put on the coffee and sit down to write.

I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.

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.

There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.

Anytime that I've felt uninspired, I don't force myself to sit down and write. I only do it when I feel the impulse.

I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

Some days, you will sit down, and you write tens of thousands of words. Others, you have to force yourself to write a single sentence.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

I've hung around in absolute exhaustion and starvation waiting for an idea to hit, which might have been months. I've talked things over with editors, found out what they wanted, and when they wanted it delivered.

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

When I hit a period of not being able to write music, I get up and walk away. It's pretty mean but it's true.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

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.

The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

To be honest, making albums is really never easy. It's always a bit excruciating because there's always this fight to make it great, and then you hit these stumbling blocks along the way.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

I have a hard time writing music when I'm on tour.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.