James Payn Quotes

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

There's the occasional script that just hammers you, that you can't shower off.

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

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

The profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

Scriptwriting is the toughest part of the whole racket... the least understood and the least noticed.

If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

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

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.