Daily Output Quotes

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!

If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

My job is to put as many ideas out there as possible every day. Some of them will get traction, some won't - some of them shouldn't.

Back in my pulp-mag days, I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5,000-7,500 words in a single day.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon would often write a song a day, so I have the same workmanlike philosophy.

A job on a newspaper is a special thing. Every day you take something that you found out about, and you put it down and in a matter of hours it becomes a product. Not just a product like a can or something. It is a personal product that people, a lot of people, take the time to sit down and read.

A writer is someone who has written something today

It takes a week to do a sitcom in Hollywood. I do a show a day in my studio, three or four shows a week.

I figure 1000 words a day, or four pages, and sometimes I'll write more, but I'll try not to. Because I think you don't want to exhaust what it is you're writing about, so the next day you would have to gear up for a brand new scene.

It's pretty funny to me when I hear people say, 'I write six songs every day,' or, 'I turn out a song a day.' I bet you that's a whole week of bad songs.

I set myself 600 words a day as a minimum output, regardless of the weather, my state of mind or if I'm sick or well. There must be 600 finished words-not almost right words.

I write 2,000 words a day when I write. It sometimes takes three hours, it sometimes takes five hours.

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That's so many pages longhand.

I write four books a year. I'm very fortunate that I write quickly; around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

I can only write about two or three pages of fiction a day.

The process of doing films is not my favorite, but I love television. Television is a quicker turnaround. You shoot more during the day, which makes me feel more productive. It would be like, 'I did five scenes today and ten pages.' That's television.

If I'm really feeling good and not having a lot of interruptions, I can do a minute of animation a day, so theoretically, I could do a film in three months without any interruptions.

I work just as much as I always worked. And I can't explain the fact that there have been a series of books coming rather regularly out of me. I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.

If I'm going really, really fast, I can do a page of finished text a day, on average.