Jack Dunphy Quotes

I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

I have nothing like a writing routine. I sometimes have trouble buckling down to write at home.

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.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

While in the middle of writing a book, I have a hard time reading other books for pleasure.

I can have people around a lot more because I'm not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

The problem with most of the want-to-be authors is that they are unable to focus. Either they have no idea of where to begin, or they have hundreds of ideas and don't know which one to pick. Both scenarios leading to one result... they give up even before they start.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

I'll just drive around if I'm stuck on something or have a case of writer's block.

I write a lyric, but when I reread it, I think it's awful and either hide it or crumple it up.

I think, with most writers, their neurosis is finishing things. I have a different neurosis. I'm terribly anxious when it's not finished. Then I become really difficult to live with.

I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.

The hardest part for me is to finish a track. I start new projects all the time.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

When I'm supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write.

When I'm looking for an idea, I'll do anything--clean the closet, mow the lawn, work in the garden.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

I notice that I only publish once every four years. It takes a couple of years to write a book and then, for me, for one reason or another, it usually takes about a year of sort of dicking around before I start up. I write a review or little magazine pieces and touring with the other book. But mainly it's just you're not ready, I'm not ready to start another. You're just not up for it.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.