Mark Twain Quotes

Each book gets harder, each book gets harder and harder. I always feel like crying when I have to write.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing.

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors.

the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

I start out to write five days a week, and then it runs to six days and finally seven. Then, eventually, that wave of weariness overwhelms me and I don't know what's the matter. That is, I know but I won't admit it. I'm just tired from writing. As you get older, writing becomes harder. By that I mean you see so many more potentialities. Things like transition used to trouble me. But not any more. When I say it's harder, I'm not talking about facility. You learn all the so-called tricks, but then you don't want to use them.

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.

It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.

...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.

I thought when I started writing that I'd have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.

I try to write a lot and my process is kind of back and forth. I procrastinate a lot so when I do sit down to write, I'm pretty lazy at it. And it's such a frustrating thing sometimes - writing - when you don't do it all the time, you get that thing in your head that you have nothing to talk about and you can't write songs.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

I never want to think or write about the topic again when I'm finished with it.

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.

I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.