Lynda Barry Quotes

I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the problem is.

In 2012, I really thought, 'That's it. It's over. I've written what I can write.'

That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening.

Writer's block is for people who have the luxury of time.

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

Sometimes I draw blanks.

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

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

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

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

Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.

For the next three plus years, I really was not in creative shape. That part of my brain was not functioning.

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.

Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. I was drawing comics all the time and didn't have the time or energy to do anything else. That got to me in the end.

The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.

This is terrible, when a writer is bored by his own work, but it was a real bomb and had reached the point where I couldn't even stand to look at it any more.

You know, most good playwrights write seven good plays and then something happens and after that they're crap.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden.

Sometimes when you're heavy into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you don't know if you could ever do it again.

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.

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.'