Paul Di Filippo Quotes

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'

I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

A man starts upon a sudden, takes Pen, Ink, and Paper, and without ever having had a thought of it before, resolves within himself he will write a Book; he has no Talent at Writing, but he wants fifty Guineas.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.

Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions.

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?

If you want to be a writer, all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil, and I had a manual typewriter. It doesn't cost money to write. It costs money to make art. So I would just write. I would hand out stories in the classes in high school. And the teacher would say, "Whatever you do, don't become a writer."

I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.

I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.

I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.

I've always defined myself as a writer, I've never decided what it was I was gonna write. [...] I always fancied myself one, but I'm not. I'm so far from a writer.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

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.

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.

People just don't know how to write down a simple easy line. It's difficult for them; it's like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning - not many can do it.