James Thurber Quotes

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

I often feel like not writing! Sometimes I overcome it by just sitting there until writing happens. Sometimes I don't write, because books often need periods of percolation.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

Usually writer's block arises when something is wrong internally with the story.

I am not - thank heavens - one of those 'driven' writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

As a writer, you live in permanent self-doubt; you're on permanent trial.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

There's no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can't think freely and imagine freely. There just really is no point.

For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That's a great way to freeze up.

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

Writing is such a weird emotional thing. It's hard. If you sit down with a plan to write something, it's going to be harder.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

But there's a little guy who sits astride my brain with a whip, and if I'm away from the machine for more than a couple of hours during the day, this little guy's lashing away.

Every day I wake up afraid that I won't be able to write, that today is the day it has left me.