John Dos Passos Quotes

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

There's nothing more painful than writing.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.

Writers are always critical of themselves and I'm no exception. I always feel that maybe I could have done better.

My stories are never quite good enough.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it's getting harder because I want to improve with every book.

I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it's disheartening; you don't want to go on. That's what I think is hard - the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done.

I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.

I think I could go away tomorrow. I've already accomplished something. It's such a selfish business that sometimes I get sick of myself.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

My toughest criticism usually comes from myself. As my editor can attest to, I'm never done tweaking a book until the production department has to rip it from my hands!

Every word I write I suspect the next day.

A writer is seldom satisfied with the condition he finds himself in. We're all given to fretting a lot.

Sometimes I get frustrated with my own self because I'm such a perfectionist.

I write really slowly, and my lines are really, really terrible all the time. It takes so long for me to get them to be where I won't be embarrassed to sing them, and then feel like they're great.

The thing is, I've been writing for a long time now, trying to be a poet for the last 40 years, and it's still very difficult not to second-guess myself when reading my own work.

Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer.

I barely ever reread the chapter before posting, because I overthink things, and I feel like overediting or trying to use too many words can ruin the story.

I wrote lots of pages. I showed what I wrote to Iowa friends, and they said, 'Good start.' That was discouraging because I thought it was almost done.

For as long as writers have written, they've had second thoughts about their work.