Stacy Schiff Quotes

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.

The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task.

Writing is hard - writing is the hardest.

I make charts of songs that are good candidates, good targets, so to speak. Then I try to come up with ideas for parodies. And 99% of those ideas are horrible.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

The word 'novel' carries, for me, a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered.

The most difficult thing about living as a writer is precisely 'having to write.' Pretending to be a writer is easy. Living freely, reading many books, going on frequent trips, cultivating minor eccentricities... but genuinely being a writer is difficult, because you have to write something that will convince both yourself and readers.

No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always feel the same challenge - how do you shape this story into a book that people are going to love.

I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.

I think that we're all, as human beings, so limited. If we want to write about ourselves, that's fairly easy. And if we write about our friends or our families, we can do that. But if we want to project ourselves somewhere beyond our personal experience, we're going to fail unless we get that experience or we borrow it from others.

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.

As a writer, there are times when you have something to say, and yet no particular 'hook' upon which to hang the missive you are burning to release.

I now have to find a reason to write, every single day.

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.

It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again.

If I were to write a book about the progress of getting to a third film, it would be a long one.

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.

The truth of the matter is coming up with a title is one of the most challenging things we do.

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

Writing a book is not easy.

While writing, I'm always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, 'I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.'

It's hard for me to teach and write my own work at the same time.