Robert Sheckley Quotes

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

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.

A lot of first novels are written long before they're actually put down on paper.

I always had to wait until something hit me, and I could write it. But when I would cut an album, to me it represented the time that I spent since the last one. Just the way I was looking at the world.

I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

I have to live my books before I write them.

After a summer trip to Switzerland, which was rich in experiences, I started writing. In the beginning, I aimed at descriptions of nature and folk life until, as the years passed, the description of man became my chief interest.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.

Yes, in fact, it's hard to believe this, but it was almost 18 years ago when I first got the idea.

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.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point.

When I first started making music, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just wanted to write songs. I didn't have a concept. I didn't think it through. I was just flailing around doing what comes naturally. It took me a really long time to step back and deal with what I was doing with any kind of perspective or self-awareness.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Each time, I think I'm never going to write another book. It never gets easier.

I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I'm not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me.

But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.