Susan Sontag Quotes

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

You will never win if you never begin.

When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.

For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.

Completing any writing project, particularly a novel, is a daunting prospect. Many people become frozen by the prospect. Others keep waiting for the right time. Some wait for the spark of inspiration. Even experienced writers find it is easier to do anything other than actually write.

When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you'll never get anything done. There's enough inner strife.

If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.

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.

The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn't writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

In a certain sense, every time you sit down to write a song, there's a fear that you've forgotten how to do it.

If you haven't done something yet, and you want to do it, start now!

The most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.

When you first sit down to write the first song, until you've maybe got three or four under your belt, it's always, to me, like a mountain to climb. You look at that one blank piece of paper and you think, 'God, how many songs do I have to write here?' It always feels like pressure.

But it is the fear, not the writing that defeats me. Everything is not a masterpiece.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Desperate? So what? I'm desperate, too!" Fenoglio snapped at her. "My story is foundering in misfortune, and these hands here," he said holding them out to her, "don't want to write anymore! I'm afraid of words Meggie! 'Once they were like honey, now they're poison, pure poison! But what is a writer who doesn't love words anymore? What have I come to? This story is devouring me, crushing me, and I'm it's creator!

I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.

Simply by making the effort to start something, you will be miles ahead of almost everyone else.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.