Ann-Marie MacDonald Quotes

I'm a working writer; this is my job. So it matters to me that it's good. I sweat over every word. I don't just vomit this stuff up. It's agony. The only thing that comes close is childbirth, except it's like being in labor for eighteen months.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

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.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

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.

To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

I find writing extraordinarily difficult and not very pleasurable, though I find having done it very pleasurable. I won't lie about that.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

It takes me ages to write stuff.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.

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.

Writing is hard - writing is the hardest.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

The only process that comes close to the process of writing a whole book, in my experience, is childbirth. There is this moment when you think you can't possibly labour for another moment, and that, paradoxically, is when you have to push hardest.

For me, writing is really an agony. I feel as if I have a huge, luminous idea that has the potential to be really profound, and then when I set it down on paper, I find the power of the idea has been hugely weakened in the process of transmission.

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.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

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