Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes

Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.

Sometimes I go outside after a long stretch of writing and I'm surprised it's not raining. Or that it's daylight. Or that it's not the middle of winter. I don't know if that level of immersion is normal, but it's now I do things. I like it. It works well for me.

I write slowly and get distracted a lot.

There's no writer's block; there's only distraction.

In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write.

If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.

If I don't already know a song's chord progression, I'll stop writing and try to figure it out. I can occasionally listen to unstructured, amelodic ambient music, but I prefer no music. I don't need silence - I can write just about anywhere - but music is a major distraction.

I listen to music constantly while writing.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

You have to insulate yourself - I'm talking about from everything, people can be talking to you and you won't hear 'em - that's how you write a song. And I haven't been able to do that over here 'cause I'm so busy and then, when I am off, I want to get away from music.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

One constant writing ritual, no matter what I'm writing, is that I cannot write if people are around me. It wigs me out - the idea that someone is reading as I'm writing stuff.

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.

To say that I have an undisciplined mind would not be incorrect overall, but it's a little off the mark because I have great discipline when I write - but only for about ten minutes.

Sometimes I write with music on, and if I'm in a good flow, I don't even hear it.

I think we've all been in the middle of doing something we cared about, when someone coming in the room and saying 'hello' was annoying. I personally can understand that, as someone who tries to create.

With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

When I'm concentrating, I can be fixed in place for hours. In fact, there was a joke in my office that everybody would come and chat outside my door because they knew - no matter how loud they talked - if I was concentrating, it would not disturb me at all.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

I never listen to music when I'm writing.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you've got three weeks, and so on.

No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.