David Farr Quotes

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

Writing is challenging work because it's so easy to get consumed with how it's going, what's going to happen to it, who's going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

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.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Don't get it right, just get it written.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship; you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time.

But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.

Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'

I'm just very, very slow. I would not make it as a journalist, I've got to tell you. I sweat bullets over every sentence, and sometimes, you know, a day will pass and I've written one paragraph, and I've been at the computer for four hours.

I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks.

Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.