Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

I am the worlds laziest writer.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'

I don't feel prolific. I feel like I'm plodding along. Each day you sit down, and you hope that you get your work done.

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.'

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

I got so I simply gagged everytime I sat before my desk to write an ad.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

When I was working on 'Freddie,' I had been trying to write it on a computer for many, many years, but that delete button just won't let anything go forward.

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

I think I need the demons in order to write, but the demons have gone. It bothers me a lot. I've tried and tried, but I just can't seem to find a melody.

When I couldn't write, I felt like a zombie.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

The thing that was most harmful was that there was always something that was about to happen. So I found myself indulging in the writer's luxury of doing another draft, another idea. If this project isn't happening, then I'll shelve one script and start writing another. And in that way, the years go by, and there's very little money coming in.

For me, a bad day is when I have nothing going on.

I'm always good for starting a bit of a tune and the first verse, but after that I just can never go anywhere. It takes me years, that's why I'm so slow.

I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...

Hours later the blank sheet still stared at me, and I beat my fist against the desk in fury and fustration, striking it so hard my hand bled. That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.