Writing Under Pressure Quotes

There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.

I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline.

A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time

When I was in college or working, I had the luxury of writing on whatever subject. Now, I'm in the business, I have a deadline and pressures. Sometimes, I have to do things that I am not in the mood for.

My training as a journalist was invaluable: when I worked on 'The Daily Express,' the editor would often ask for 1000 words within a couple of hours. I could not say I was not inspired. I had to get on with it.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Some of our best episodes of 'Buffy' were written over a weekend. You can really get in touch with your creative spirit when you're at your most desperate.

I'm into lately being a little less precious about writing and being like, "Okay, what if I just locked myself in my room, pretend that there's someone outside with a gun that's saying, 'Don't come out until you write something.'"

I came up professionally as a lawyer, and when you're a lawyer, writing a 50-page brief in one night is just another day at the office. You learn to make choices really quickly, and you learn how to get thoughts down very quickly.

I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.'

With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.

When I started out, I was a television writer, and we wrote a television show that was on live every week. And you didn't have the luxury of coming in and waiting to be inspired. You came in and you had to write. And you wrote, because it was going to be live on the air. So I can do that.