Honore de Balzac Quotes

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

I only can write a book every two years, you know. And I write very fast, but I'm not always writing every day. I needed a contact with different things, like nature, for example. I cannot be in front of a computer trying to tell a story.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

Writing a book is the most difficult, anxiety-prone aspect of my life because the words that I put on paper are very serious to me.

Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

Writing a book is so much harder than I imagined.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.