Simon Beaufoy Quotes

I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'

I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours. I do like to write in the morning. I start after breakfast, like 9 o'clock, and I'll write till lunch, about 1. And after lunch, I just have fun.

Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer's daily routine, unless you're Dominick Dunne, isn't exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.

I probably could be a world-class screenwriter by now if I had spent the kind of work I devote on Comedy Death-Ray to that. But I do okay, in that regard. I mean, my stuff gets bought, so it's all right.

I'm still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I'll write next?

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

You know, I always was an early morning or late night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning you make up some of your most absurd jokes.

Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.

If a writer is good at what he does, it's not easy to do a good job every day... To invent something new is almost an impossible task.

I was writing blogs before work, then I was writing at work, and then I started writing books on the weekend because you just have that sort of energy in your 20s; it's wonderful.

I don't know if I want to be a writer.

I wasn't a frustrated writer who really wanted to act or a frustrated writer who really wanted to direct. I was really happy writing screenplays, and there's a lot of people who just do that - they're screenwriters.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

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 didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

People always ask, 'How do you write so many books?' And I say, I work a lot. I work six or seven days a week.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.