Howard Hawks Quotes

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

I have no literary fears.

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

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.

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

I'm excited and terrified to write something new. I won't be writing about suburbia.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better.

I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it's always there. Only bad writers think they're good.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

There's one thing now that I experience every day when I'm making a film. I get up and think to myself, 'Am I going to be able to do it today?' I figure as long as I have that fear, I'll be alright.

I can't read fiction when I'm writing fiction, because I get intimidated if I read something really good.

I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!

There was a terrible fear for me when I started writing, which was that if you'd been denied unbelievably tumultuous experience, you didn't have permission to write.

I think I'm a good joke writer. I'm also very scared that the last joke I wrote is the last joke I'll ever write.

Every single time I step into the studio, I say, 'Can I still do this? Do I still have it? Have I ever had it?' I suppose there's a good amount of self-loathing that goes into any form of artisanship.

As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.