Jessica Bird Quotes

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

Being a writer involves writing. You've got to commit to sitting down and writing instead of Xbox or Netflix.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

I'm not the most talented writer in the world. I know that. But I also know that I'm disciplined, that I work my butt off, and that I make myself write as much as I can. Writer's block is a luxury I can't afford. I'm a professional writer, which means that I put my butt in the chair each day, and I write. Simple as that.

You have to fight against all the things that will keep you out of writing, because life doesn't go with writing. You will always have something more important to do: you will have to take your children to school, you will have to cook something, you have to meet friends. But you have to fight if you want to write.

I just write from dawn to dusk.

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

You have to write every day, and you have to write whether you feel like it or not.

I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.

People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

People always ask, 'How do you write so many books?' And I say, I work a lot. I work six or seven days a week.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I think what I've recognized over the years is that I'm very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.

I write a thousand words a day.

I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours. I do like to write in the morning. I start after breakfast, like 9 o'clock, and I'll write till lunch, about 1. And after lunch, I just have fun.

And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

Writing - not being a writer with interesting habits - gets priority.