Peter Carey Quotes

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

It's weird, because I don't feel prolific. I don't write anything for months at a time.

I don't feel prolific. I feel like I'm plodding along. Each day you sit down, and you hope that you get your work done.

I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.

I had writer's block for almost a year.

I wrote 'Criminal' in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me.

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.

Titles either come to you at the beginning or they don't come to you at all, I find, and I hate the feeling that I haven't got a title because it usually means that you are left at the end scrambling around trying to find something.

As a creative person you just get an idea in your head, and sometimes you just can't shake it off.

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

I go into my workroom seven mornings a week. There will only be one or two mornings a week where it seems to be going well, but to earn those days you have to go through slow, slodgy days where your mind feels like porridge.

The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

The idea of writer's block or not having inspiration is totally terrifying to me.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

You can't really think about more than one movie at a time. You're thinking about it consciously, and the subconscious is working too, and if you cram too much into your head, you don't get any ideas in the shower.

I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

You can't rush inspiration.