Darin Strauss Quotes

When I write, I make decent money doing it, but I don't wake up dreaming about writing.

I always thought it'd be fun to write something, but it never was an ambition of mine, per se.

I wouldn't get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.

You know that gap between where you are and where you'd like to be? Within that gap, there is an ache and an aspirational leap, which is very good for writing.

Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

The reason there's no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn't have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.

When you move to New York, especially, you feel like you need to be something.

Since day one, since the first time I touched the pen, I wanted to be the best at what I do.

The problem is to find the time to write. That's why I go to sea. I couldn't be happier than when at sea.

I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.

I like writing in total isolation like out in the woods somewhere.

I have a lot of energy, and as you get to know me, you will quickly learn that! I channel my energy into my acting, my writing, everything.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

If I had grown up in London, I wouldn't have been as keen to become a comedian or a writer. I'd have been able to see a lot of good films and music and comedy. I'd have been distracted. As it was, I had to make it.

I go to class every day with the future Facebook and Twitter and Google employees, the future innovators and entrepreneurs who might have the next big thing. Knowing that and seeing their success and work ethic makes you want to be successful. It impresses me every day. It humbles me, too.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

I've had lots of wonderful people help motivate me over the years to work hard and write.

This is a fast-paced world we live in, especially the sports and entertainment industry. There is a constant demand for performance, for something new, something excellent. That doesn't just happen. You have to have enough inside to pour out.

I wrote in the cellar for a number of years. I needed a private space, and it had a furnace, so it was always warm.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

Emulation, even in brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to run a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upward or downward." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, inwardly in his mind, although outwardly in his act it would seem so. The competitors with whom his secret ambition seems to vie are the dead.

To be a musician, especially a singer-songwriter - well, you don't do that if you have a thriving social life. You do it because there's an element of alienation in your life.

There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.