Writing Conditions Quotes

My best writing is often early in the morning and, sometimes, while working out.

I prefer the night to the day and always stay up very late. Darkness is more peaceful, and I don't like sunshine - it hurts my eyes. When I used to live in more communal circumstances, I had to wait until everyone had gone to bed before I had the peace to write, and I still find I can get on with my writing much better at night.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.

I'm a very emotional writer. I always need to have a boyfriend. I always need to have some food. I always need to have a heater at my feet, and I drink this thing called Cool Brew, which I found in Louisiana. It's like condensed coffee.

I can't listen to anything when I write, not even the TV. I do have to listen to music when I drive, though.

Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

I sometimes read about authors who say they require a perfectly silent room maintained at precisely 68 degrees, with trash bags taped over the windows and a white-noise machine in the corner to write, and I think, 'Who are these people, and do any of them have kids?'

When I write, I normally write anywhere that I can feel at peace, so if it's in my bedroom, if it's at the park, if it's by a lake somewhere, wherever I feel calm is where I like to write.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

I can write pretty much anywhere.

Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

When it comes to actually writing, I like to write in a full room with the amps blasting, and a big drum set.

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

If what needs to get done is going to get done, then I can't screw around with the luxury of writing rituals or waiting for pristine writing conditions to magically materialize.

I tend to write better when I'm not touring.

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. ... poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.