Colson Whitehead Quotes

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.

The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

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 think someday you're going to be a great writer," he said. "But" he added maliciously, "first you'll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet. You only think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

Producing good stuff can be quite tough, and it involves a lot of frustration, but I always like things to be jolly and happy, and I forget that's actually not the point at the end of the day.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

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.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I usually write a lot. I don't make an album and don't write for two years and then end up with a blank paper starting over.

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

I think directing a film is like a woman going through labour. After she goes through the labour pain and delivers her first baby, she says she will not going to have another baby. Then, when she sees the child growing up, she decides to have one more child!

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

The work of creation is never without travail.

Art never comes from happiness.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.