George Orwell Quotes

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Writing a book isn’t an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life’s most satisfying achievements.

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

The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

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.

I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over...

Writing has never been that simple for me.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

The only good grades I ever got in school before I was kicked out were for creative writing. I thought that fiction might be in my future but then my career took a different path once the Beatles showed me what a blast being in a band could be. Writing my memoir Late, Late at Night reminded me how much I love the craft. So I decided to give fiction a shot again.Magnificent Vibration is the result. I’m still not quite sure where it came from, but once I got going, it practically wrote itself. I’ve heard writers I admire speak of that phenomenon, so maybe I’m on the right track.

The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.