Sam Shepard Quotes

Encourage aspiring writers to continue writing when things are going against them, when it feels hard. Explain the typical obstacles that occur, and encourage and reassure them to continue, never to give up.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

Here's the bottom line; writers write. Sometimes words flow easily. Sometimes it's like sloughing through mud. Either way a professional writer keeps writing.

By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

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.

The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.

If there is a secret to writing, I haven’t found it yet. All I know is you need to sit down, clear your mind, and hang in there.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it--even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing.

Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.

You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.

The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art!

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not. So it's hard for me to come up with things, because I don't write stuff, I don't write my act down.

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.

...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.