Difficulty Of Writing Quotes

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms. ~ Bee Wilson

For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult. ~ Adam Mansbach

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems. ~ Khaled Hosseini

It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, ~ Helen Keller

If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach. ~ Mem Fox

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former ~ Ben Lerner

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I never took any writing classes or planned to write. But I was working as an advertising copywriter in the late '80s and thought, 'What a shame there has never been a decent book on Jean Harlow,' then thought, 'Why don't I write one myself?' being kind of an idiot and not having the slightest idea what I was getting myself into. ~ Eve Golden

To know an other's interior life you are his confessor or a writer - the one is admitted freely, the other intrudes by discerning of spirits ~ John Geddes

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication. ~ John Cheever

I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family. ~ Michael Pollan

I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction. ~ John Gimlette

of our incident board.' Ayala tentatively stood and approached the whiteboard, which was ominously empty. 'What am I writing?' 'Start with our three victims ~ Daniel Campbell

We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart. ~ Philip K. Dick

The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points. ~ Iris Johansen

I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read. ~ Gayl Jones

I'm writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don't think I can say it. I'm not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I'm doing it to thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you. ~ Ann Brashares

Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory. ~ John Kessel

I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff. ~ Amanda Peet

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer. ~ Philip Pullman

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong." ~ Jamaica Kincaid

there's a big difference between death threats and love letters--even if the person writing the death threats still claims to actually love you. Of course, considering I once tried to kill someone I loved, maybe I had no right to judge. ~ Richelle Mead

What would writing this sort of story mean to others? ~ Stephen King

Nothing is owed to us in life, not even the innocence of a blue sky. Great art is the art of thankfulness for the abundance of every moment. Writing is a Chinese variant of this thankfulness, a courtesy to life in its cloak of nothing, lined with love. ~ Christian Bobin

Frankly, I have always dreaded writing - there always seemed to be pain involved, unpleasant self-examination and a lot of fear. ~ Trent Reznor

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within. ~ Pico Iyer

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him. ~ Henry Miller

Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty. I cannot say I despise you - for I am honest. You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. - ~ Thomas Mann

[On the New Testament:] I ... must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the men who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the men who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we [women] are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have. ~ Sarah Moore Grimke

Her face was as red as her hair. "What are you doing," she cried.
Devon put a question mark next to the sentence. "Editing your paper." What did it look like he was doing?
"You're just cutting out stuff!"
"What do you think editing is? ~ M.M. John

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another. ~ Sean O'Casey

Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own. ~ Caroline Kennedy

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure
in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. ~ Marge Piercy

Songwriting ability is a gift. After a while, you come to realize, "I've really been blessed. I can write these things and it makes me happy, and it makes millions of people happy." It's an obligation, it's bigger than you. It's the only true magic I know. It's not pulling a rabbit out of a hat; it's real. It's your soul floating out to theirs. ~ Tom Petty

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The craft of writing – whether novels, screenplays, essays or whatever – held a special fascination for Trumbo. And his work always showed great technical proficiency. ~ Bruce Cook

It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free or could be free without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age, so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have appeared credible. ~ John Stuart Mill

I used to get letters from guys in prison. Anymore now I don't even open them. They'd ask me to please sign a couple of cards for their children. Then I see them on eBay two weeks later. Or the people that write and say, "You is one of my favorite cartoonists. I would like a drawing, please." I guess they encourage inmates to write letters to celebrities. It's like a way to make money by selling autographs or something. Give me a break. ~ Mike Royer