Mohsin Hamid Quotes

Writing, overall, has never been what I'd call fun. It's fulfilling. It doesn't come real easy for me.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.

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 think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

Each time, I think I'm never going to write another book. It never gets easier.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

Writing is the only thing in my life that doesn't get easier. It just doesn't.

Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.

Writing for me can be homework. I do get a lot from it in the end. But I hate doing it.

The idea that every time you do a film you're supposed to be tortured confuses me. I mean, guys who say, 'Oh, it's really tough, my character is really suffering' -come on. For us, even in the rotten ones we've had a good time. I don't think you have to suffer.

In 'Dark Skye,' I rewrote every one of the Pandemonia scenes over and over before I was happy with them - hundreds of pages are now sitting in a folder called 'Cuttings,' never to be read. Ouch!

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

'One With You' was the hardest book I have ever written. I rewrote it three times.

The only process that comes close to the process of writing a whole book, in my experience, is childbirth. There is this moment when you think you can't possibly labour for another moment, and that, paradoxically, is when you have to push hardest.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.