Walter Benjamin Quotes

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

I remember trying to write at 1, 1:30 A.M., and just sort of falling asleep. And I think that was actually a good creative state for weird ideas. I shifted to a morning schedule once I had two kids, and I still found that if I slept badly, I actually had better ideas.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.

I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.

I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

I am always writing; if you want to survive in this business, you need to keep working, keep creating and never stop the output.

I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

I feel like I spend most of my time in a state of writer's block! When things do come out, they come out quickly.

I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

I'm not really worried about writer's block.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

When you open your mind up, and you go into a creative state, you can't just switch if off. When you have an idea, a creative impulse, and then you ignore it, it can keep you up when you just want to go to your bed - which is why it's great to have voice recorders on your phone!

Here's the bottom line; writers write. Sometimes words flow easily. Sometimes it's like sloughing through mud. Either way a professional writer keeps writing.

Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

I write in the mornings, in the bright daylight. But I get most of my good ideas after the sun has gone down and the dark is on the land.

When I'm looking for an idea, I'll do anything--clean the closet, mow the lawn, work in the garden.