Anthony Powell Quotes

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

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

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

I do labor - it's part of the process. Writing is no easier today than it was in the beginning: writing well is very hard to do. Always.

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

Writing is a mysterious activity.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

I know how demanding the process of creation is.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Writing has got to be some of the hardest work I know.

I love to write. I have always loved writing. That was my first love.

Looking back at it now, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of work that went into writing 'Shine', and to come up with the ideas that we're doing now.

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

I think attempting to make art is a utopian process in itself, definitely. Nothing I do is ever equal to the ideas in my head. You do the best you can, you do it with patience and love, and then you give up. The moment you give up is when you know the book is done.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

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

I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.