Creative Delay Quotes

By the time I was 12, I had memorised hundreds of couplets. I could recite for hours poems written by others. I knew I could write a line in metre. But I never dared to do it till I was 33 years old.

'All-Star Wonder Woman' would get worked on in what is laughably referred to as my 'spare time.' I just ended up with less and less time to devote to it. Eventually, we all realized that it was taking forever, so we just all agreed to hold off on it 'til the time was right to do it properly. Well, I still have a contract; DC never tore it up.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

When I was younger, I definitely wish I had felt more... I just wish I had started actually putting out my music earlier because I didn't do it until I graduated high school and felt like I was leaving. That's mostly because I have never liked my voice a lot or been like a particularly great singer.

I started a novel right before 'The Imitation Game,' so it's funny now, four years later, to be coming almost back to finishing it.

I wrote one called 'The No Hotel.' I got inspired in 1989 while I was on a trip down to Brazil, and I didn't finish it until eight years later.

I think part of the process of putting out a record is always looking back because, by the time a song comes out, it's been a year since you wrote it.

Artists, no matter how good their intentions, are always slower than they think.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

The thing that was most harmful was that there was always something that was about to happen. So I found myself indulging in the writer's luxury of doing another draft, another idea. If this project isn't happening, then I'll shelve one script and start writing another. And in that way, the years go by, and there's very little money coming in.

I'm sure you're aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can suddenly start coming out at once even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago.

It took me 29 years to finish that song. That's a typical Jardine move.

It seems to take me about five years to get a record together, which is not a clever idea.

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my memory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me.

We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.

I never succeed in painting scenes, however beautiful, immediately upon returning from them. I must wait for a time to draw a veil over the common details.

The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.

It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'

With 'Brick,' I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn't make the movie until I was 30.

Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.

I love research so much that I do an enormous amount; it helps put off the moment of starting to write the story.