Lisa Unger Quotes

Writing is a funny thing. It's not like you're working on a schedule. It comes in fits and starts.

It's different every time you write. Sometimes it might be harder than it was the day before. I don't like forcing it, but sometimes, if you force it a little bit, it helps you to push forward, and you get inspired in a way. I've written songs in an hour. And there are songs that have taken me six months.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

To me, writing is the most fun. It's not always fun, but finally when you make it come out the way you want, it's then you can say, 'It's fun, boy.'

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Writing is a solitary profession; you are really alone when you write. Then the emotions become well shaped and distinct. But their transition into words must be done deliberately and with rigid artistry.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

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.

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.

I write - and then I write some more.

I learned long ago, back with 'Lover Revealed,' that my job is to sit at the computer, shut up and type. Otherwise? The pictures and the voices go away!

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

Writing is challenging work because it's so easy to get consumed with how it's going, what's going to happen to it, who's going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.