Sue Townsend Quotes

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face, I’m pretty sure.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

It's that drama that drives authors, you know.

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

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.

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

'One With You' was the hardest book I have ever written. I rewrote it three times.

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

Good scripts, which are apt for me, eventually come to me.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.

If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

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

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.