Philip Seymour Hoffman Quotes

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

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.

I, for one, find writing excruciating. Some mornings, as I'm on my way to my desk, my hands actually tremble with fear. The fear, of course, is that I'll sit down at the desk and discover that what I've written is claptrap. Fear inevitably leads to procrastination.

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

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

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

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.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.

I've always said the hardest aspect of the job of being a writer is writing.