Lena Dunham Quotes

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.

When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.

Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

Never regret what you don't write.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

What I love is the writing, it's not having written. I like the process of it.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy that kind of process.

I'm addicted to creating and writing.

I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.