Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.

The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

I try to hurt myself, to sprain something, writing every novel and story, because I'm stretching for something new and difficult that I haven't done before.

When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. "You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like.

I just write the stuff I want to at the time, what feels right for me.

People say, write what you know, but it's really, write about what obsesses you. Write about what you're thinking about all the time.

Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

I am sure of this: that no one can write a book which children will like unless he write it for himself first.

My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends.

I try not to push characters too close to myself because they get harder to write, but as a writer, you try to find odd little personal experiences that you hope are universal or think might be universal.

Becoming a writer wasn't a choice (there would have been far more worthwhile things to do); it was the best, most fruitful way of being a bit ill.

Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear - that's what makes it powerful.

I had a year of panic attacks. I was feeling really pressured, like I could never do it again. With a first novel, you put things on hold because it takes so much mental energy and self-belief to keep on writing.