Virginia Woolf Quotes

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

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

ARGH! There's no such thing [as writer's block]. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair. James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?' Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always? How many words did you get today?' the friend pursued. Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): 'Seven.' Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.' Yes,' Joyce said, finally looking up. 'I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!

You'll never write anything that really satisfies you though it may satisfy other people.

Usually if a scene's really hard to write, I just don't write it. Nothing's coming to mind.

You will face boredom and frustration your entire career as artists. You will be very frustrated seeking a voice/style that collectors can connect with. Once you accomplish that voice/style people are clamoring for, you will become bored doing it.

That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

Writing is like pulling your hair out. You have nothing, and you can't think of anything, but you have to think of something.

I just said, you know, this is a great track but this lyric, I don't believe it. It sounds like I'm trying to say something, instead of it naturally coming out of me, like I was saying something that I already knew. Anyway, I can't remember what it was. And either I threw it all out or I threw 90 percent of it out, and kept a line or two. That's happened a couple of times to me. Not too often, but a couple of times. Very aggravating when it does happen.

Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

I felt kind of bored at the prospect of writing some more of my own songs because I really wasn't saying what I wanted to say.

When I have just sat down and tried to write the lyrics of a song, usually about half of it sounds like bullshit. I just have to go away from something and come back to it again later. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

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?

He suddenly announced that he could not write any more since "All that I have written seems like straw to me."