Andy Rooney Quotes

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.

It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

I'm not the kind of writer that goes, 'I'm gonna write a song about sunshine,' or, 'I've just heard a phrase, so I'm gonna write that,' and then I write a song. I'll wait for inspiration to hit, and you can't depend on it.

If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.

Ideas come from everywhere - they come from what you see and hear and imagine.

Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.

Sometimes you run out of ideas, just like if you are a writer or whatever. Then you just have to wait around for something to inspire you or look for something to inspire you.

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.

One of the most common questions writers are asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.

I've hung around in absolute exhaustion and starvation waiting for an idea to hit, which might have been months. I've talked things over with editors, found out what they wanted, and when they wanted it delivered.

My way of working was different years ago. I used to wait until an idea came to me. Now I go half-way to meet it, though I don't know whether I find it any the quicker.

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

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.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

A lot of people think inspiration means magic. But really, inspiration means to put life into something.

I don't write on demand - I wait for inspiration to come.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

I've read somewhere that when you're writing, you should stop while you're doing well so you always want to go back to work.