Anna Quindlen Quotes

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

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.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

I find it really hard to say anything coherent or interesting about the work I do.

Two years passed, and I had no second book to follow 'Roots.' Four years passed, six years. When a decade had passed without me having another book to follow 'Roots,' I was having serious private frustrations with myself.

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.

I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.

If after two weeks you still can't write your middle-eight, the best course of action is to see a psychiatrist

I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.

Writer's block? Don't worry about it. Either it goes away or you die.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

I hate writing.

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

I feel like some sort of fiction-writing hobo, jumping trains and always hoping I'll find a good place to start a fire in the next town. And I keep having these panicky episodes where I corner my husband and rant at him: 'I don't have anywhere to write! I can't write! I don't have a place to write!'

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.

I'm going to quit writing.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

The idea of writer's block or not having inspiration is totally terrifying to me.

Ever since I was twelve, I dreamed of being an author. I just never had the fortitude to see any of my stories through to completion. I would start a book, get a few chapters in, and grow bored or get distracted by something else.

You're always looking for good scripts and when they're not always forthcoming you go mad.