Ann Brashares Quotes

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.

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

There's no writer's block; there's only distraction.

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

Sometimes I'll go without writing for a while and I'll start to be driven nuts. I start doubting my writing ability. So I'll sit down and a dozen songs will pop out. It's fun.

Don't talk about it - you'll talk it away. Let the ideas flow from your mind to the page without exposing them to air. Especially hot air.

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.

I do worry that it's impossible to write something original, that there's nothing that a human hasn't already thought of. But I can put it out of my mind and get on with what I'm doing.

I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die.

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

I'm a believer that you shouldn't really talk about the drawing until you're done with the drawing.

The hardest part of doing anything creatively is just getting up and doing.

Writer's block is your self-critic getting in the way, because creativity will just flow otherwise.

I'm really happy when I'm actively creating things. When I'm frustrated and not excited, it's because I haven't written anything in a month or so.

Write first, worry later.

All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

I can't even find the perfect brush so I can paint what's going through my mind. Racing 'gainst myself but I'm a couple steps behind.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.