Writer's Struggle Quotes

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

I'm a very slow screenwriter. It takes time for me to write a screenplay. Also, I feel it's not my strength.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Writing is mainly perspiration, not inspiration.

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.

I don't feel prolific. I feel like I'm plodding along. Each day you sit down, and you hope that you get your work done.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

Fiction has always been a thorn in my side, because I've always wanted to be a writer but I can't seem to really do it.

Writers are nothing but beggars with a good line.

When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.

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

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

Your worst enemy as a writer - especially one working online a lot of the time - is obscurity.

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It's a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

I think one of the problems with being a fiction writer these days is that you can't keep up with the headlines. Things that people would say are absurd occur the next day or they come out of somebody's mouth. There are days I just wanna give up.

Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.