Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

When you work as hard as you can and as much as you can to make your first album, and you don't make any money, then you change things.

I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say.

After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published.

I always wanted to be a writer... 'Critical Care' was my first published work. I was 34 when it came out. I was accumulating 'Critical Care' for years. I would go for a whole year and not touch it. And then I'd go back to it.

I love all of my children equally, all of my printed books, and each one bears a special piece of me. But the one I'm most proud of is the one no one will ever see - the very first manuscript I ever wrote, back in 1990. It took me a year to do it.

'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it.

I remember the first time I held my book, my first book in my hands. I cannot tell you how it moved me.

So I won an Oscar. It's amazing. I've got that for the rest of my life for a performance I am proud of. It nearly killed me. I am really proud of the film. That's it, moving on.

Work—honest work—is not degrading. The man who by honest toil earns an honest living is a peer of the realm.

I'd rather they call me a national treasure than a national waste of time. And yes, it does feel good, but I've had to earn it.

There's still, even now, a part of me that can't believe that I got published. That part of me has never gone away.

Yes, I love good clothes, good shoes, but I earned it.

Every young player in England wants to do well and just wants to help their families, be someone that their family can be remembered for.

I have worked for everything. I am self-made and proud of it.

Just being known for a skill you've worked on your entire life is an amazing feeling.

Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.

I never imagined I'd write a book.