Clarice Lispector Quotes

The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

I would say I'd rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.

Writing is hard, hard work; that's just the way it is.

For me, filming is always like delivery pains.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths.

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.

I do labor - it's part of the process. Writing is no easier today than it was in the beginning: writing well is very hard to do. Always.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.

Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.

The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.

There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.

I think people think filmmaking is fun, but I've never thought that. For me it's always been a lot of work and pain and stress.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides.

Writing is just always hard for me. It always feels like drawing blood. It's never particularly easy.

Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me.

Here's what I didn't know when I was starting out that I now know…I thought when you were starting out it was really hard to write because you hadn't broken in yet, you hadn't really hit your stride yet. What I found out paradoxically is that the next script you write doesn't get easier because you wrote one before…each one gets harder by a factor of 10.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

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.

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.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.