Writing Obstacles Quotes

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

The word 'novel' carries, for me, a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

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.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

It's difficult for writers in the theatre. It's difficult for writers in the theatre.

Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.

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

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

Writing is the only thing in my life that doesn't get easier. It just doesn't.

When you are a writer the assist-to-turnover ratio...there are a lot more turnovers than assists. It's just the nature of the beast.

I don't remember ever having writer's block. If I sit in there for four hours, I'll usually have something.

I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.

Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all.

The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

Writing isn't everyone's favorite thing to do or what their thing is.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.