Dirk Benedict Quotes

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

I don't think I realised how stressed I was, being a single parent. It was really, really stressful. It's not easy on anybody.

I had a year of panic attacks. I was feeling really pressured, like I could never do it again. With a first novel, you put things on hold because it takes so much mental energy and self-belief to keep on writing.

Single parenting is sometimes just a case of sitting around by yourself in mild despair, not knowing what to do.

For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

My writing life has included the struggle to bring up three children. What I do three or four times a year is take myself off to a hotel room to unblock a problem.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

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.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

There are so many projects that I've written and had to abort because either I felt too distressed by what I was doing to the people who I was writing about, or they couldn't cope with it because their view of themselves was so far removed from reality.

Writing is just always hard for me. It always feels like drawing blood. It's never particularly easy.

As a single parent, it can really be tough if the father's not in the picture much. Physically, emotionally and financially, you are trying to be there for your child and it can really get on top of you.

To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

Writing is the hardest for me. It doesn't come as naturally as the other forms, and I feel far more dread during the process. Acting and voice acting are more mercurial and maybe come a little easier to me.

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art.

I'm always working, and I'm a single parent, so I don't think I have time for stuff most normal people do.

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn't really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

Sadness, irritability, fatigue, and distractedness are among the most common side effects of grief while parenting.

It's really hard just making dinner as a single parent, but I'm figuring it out. I just have to be more focused and efficient with my little scraps of time that I do have.

For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you're staring at the page and thinking, like, 'Uh, is this any good? What am I doing?'