Anne Lamott Quotes

Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

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.

Writing is just always hard for me. It always feels like drawing blood. It's never particularly easy.

It is easier to rewrite anything - even the worst writing in the world - than it is to write something from scratch.

I'm not a poet. So the writing process is a difficult one for me.

Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper... sharp pencils... typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk... roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter... and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.

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

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

Writing is very difficult. You have 120 pages of blank paper and it's like, "Go fill that up with some funny stuff," and that's challenging.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

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

Writing is hard, hard work; that's just the way it is.

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.

The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get.

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.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

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

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

Writing a book is not easy.

I usually write a lot. I don't make an album and don't write for two years and then end up with a blank paper starting over.

It's always a daily struggle to write.

I have a great respect for people that write. I don't know how they do it every day... or do novels that they have to use their minds instead of just their memories. It's tough duty.