Deborah Eisenberg Quotes

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

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.

I am the worlds laziest writer.

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

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

The hardest part of writing is the first draft, and the closer you get to your deadline, the messier your workspace becomes - but that's the same with any creative outlet.

It's not very glamorous. People certainly wouldn't think so if they saw me sitting in my woolly socks at the kitchen table. Many times I sit at the typewriter and think, 'Why am I doing this?'

All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.

When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.

I can't sit and twiddle my thumbs. I have to start writing even if it's miserable some days.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.

Write first, worry later.

The first line of the song is always the hardest thing to write. And then after that, the song should - unless it sucks - it should write itself.

I often feel like not writing! Sometimes I overcome it by just sitting there until writing happens. Sometimes I don't write, because books often need periods of percolation.

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

I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.

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'm just very, very slow. I would not make it as a journalist, I've got to tell you. I sweat bullets over every sentence, and sometimes, you know, a day will pass and I've written one paragraph, and I've been at the computer for four hours.

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.

Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.