Dick Cavett Quotes

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

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.

Sometimes, if I don't write for a day or two, I get backed up - it's like constipation.

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

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

I'm certainly afraid of not being able to write for some reason. I guess I've had spells of not necessarily writer's block, but something like that. I find that pretty terrifying.

I don't know if I have writing habits. Writing is impossible and every time I have to do it I kind of forget how.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.

I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing.

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.

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 think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

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.

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 continue to wish that writing were easier, that it would flow out completely perfect with no need for revisions.