Gloria Steinem Quotes

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

There are millions of ways to not be writing. You say you're not in the mood, you'll pick it up tomorrow.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.

I have nothing like a writing routine. I sometimes have trouble buckling down to write at home.

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.

I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel, and before I know, I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.

The best way for me to procrastinate as a writer is research.

Much of my work has come from being lazy.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

If you react to every barking dog, if you stop for every barking dog, you're never getting home.

I'm the kind of person who will set time aside to do something and then do everything but that thing.

If what needs to get done is going to get done, then I can't screw around with the luxury of writing rituals or waiting for pristine writing conditions to magically materialize.

She probably gave up and started playing Minesweeper." [...] We reached the cafe and found Sydney bent over her laptop, with a barely eaten Danish and what was probably her fourth cup of coffee. We slid into seats beside her. "How's it—hey! You ARE playing Minesweeper!

A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.

When I'm supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write.

I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

The slothful is the servant of the counters.

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Just imagine how much you'd get done if you stopped actively sabotaging your own work.