Daniel Alarcon Quotes

Writing is difficult. It's a time commitment, it's labor and I'd have to get myself to sit down and actually do the work and outline.

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

To be honest, I used to always procrastinate when I write. I mean, I love writing, but I hate it.

But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.

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.

The writing is amazing because having a hand in creating what you're going to be performing... there's nothing like it. It's always going to be better suited for you. You're always going to know the lines faster, because you wrote it. The writing is so very hard. It's the hardest part of the whole process. In some ways the acting is a lot easier and a lot more fun.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.

Finally, if you want to write, you have to just shut up, pick up a pen, and do it. I'm sorry there are no true excuses. This is our life. Step forward. Maybe it's only for ten minutes. That's okay. To write feels better than all the excuses.

That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper.

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

I do not like to write - I like to have written.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

When I write I get to the point where I slow down and I gotta go back into the world and live nahmean.

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.