Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes

The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

So much of writing is done alone in a room in sweatpants, with only the Internet for company.

I think that with the proliferation of writing programs, people tend to forget that you also have to get used to working alone, and you have to be your own support.

It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again.

The comics work is very slow, and it basically involves working for sometimes years in isolation and not knowing how the work is going to be received.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

The challenge is always as a writer, is this going to work, because it's a very intimate process, and I tend to be very introverted and insular, and when I write, it's in my head.

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.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.

Naturally, you don't sit down in "white hot inspiration" and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.

I learned how difficult it is to be an artist. There are always compromises. The record company wants you to do this, your fans want you to do this, your family, you can't concentrate on your work. It's a hard thing to be an artist and not give up. That's why I have so much respect for people like Dylan and Neil Young and Tom Waits, because they keep at it. I have a new respect for a true artist.

Every book is a kind of struggle, and it's a miracle when it comes out.

I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you've always had.

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don't believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.