Virginia Woolf Quotes

When I see a film, I'll remember that there was a time when it wasn't working, and there was some pain and angst in order to get it to work.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

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.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

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

Movies are hard work. The public doesn't see that. The critics don't see it. But they're a lot of work. A lot of work.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

For me, there's a bad year of getting started on something. You write bad stuff and it's awkward to throw it out, and you wait around to get some good ideas that maybe do come or don't come. Until eventually you get the voice and autonomy of the characters, the characters have personality, and they sort of pick up the weight and put it on their shoulders. That's when it becomes a little more fun.

In a way I do hate the process of writing. It's like learning a role where you never think you're going to be able to conquer it when you start and it just takes enough focus and narrowing and getting enthusiastic and not losing it and so on. It's never good enough, but you aim for something and you hope it comes somewhat close. But it is a pleasure once you have written it.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

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 is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

I write so slowly, I could write with my own blood and not hurt myself.

Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity.

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.