Best 113 quotes in «writer's block quotes» category

I've never had writer's block.

Beauty breeds beauty, truth triggers truth. The cure for writer's block is therefore to read.

If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?

Bucky Katt: A bad writer is just a good writer with writer's block.

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else

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

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

Allowing yourself to make mistakes can ultimately go beyond a writer’s block.

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

And I rushed outside to memorize a tree ... for all time, if I can, I want to have it present, for at least one of all the stories that remain to be told, for a tree-lined lane down which I want to wander darkly someday, in one paragraph at least amid the maze of writing may the word 'tree' one day resound! Yet the dusk was falling, and my eyes, which were weary and which I didn't trust, could no longer make out the precise ... the true nature of a tree.

A writer is always writing for someone.

A hammer made of deadlines is the surest tool for crushing writer's block.

A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.

A writer is never alone, he is always with himself

Being a self-employed means you work 12 hours a day for yourself so you don't have to work 8 hours a day for someone else.

Being self-employed means you work 12 hours a day for yourself so you don't have to work 8 hours a day for someone else.

Breaking through writer's block is like thinking out of the box: Both require an ability to imagine a world outside your four walls or rearranging them to get a better view.

Considering I'm a writer, you leave me strangely bereft of words.

Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul.

Every book has its ancestors

Everyone has a story inside them. It's your truth. Write your truth!

All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.

Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come.

Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.

Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.

I am sorry, I am not a writer. I simply put my thoughts on paper. Those helped by them call them a book and me a writer. Those who are not helped call it rubbish and me a fool. Both have reason.

Good writing is both what one does and does not say.

He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed: Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical. Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed: (Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".) Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed: Gregory: You're just pulling my leg.

How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?

I am what I have ever read

I deal with writer’s block by lowering my expectations. I think the trouble starts when you sit down to write and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent—and when you don’t, panic sets in. The solution is never to sit down and imagine that you will achieve something magical and magnificent. I write a little bit, almost every day, and if it results in two or three or (on a good day) four good paragraphs, I consider myself a lucky man. Never try to be the hare. All hail the tortoise.

I don't believe in writers' block. Do doctors have 'doctors block?' Do plumbers have 'plumbers' block?" No. We all have days when we don't feel like working, but why do writers turn that into something so damn special by giving it a faintly romantic name.

I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing

Failing to writer everyday doesn't mean that you've given up, though a chapter a day - keeps writers block away!

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient." [The Guardian, 25 February 2010]

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.

If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs

If you surrender to your imagination, the story will write itself.

If you have writer’s block, write about having writer’s block, and you will no longer have it.

I have found repeatedly hitting my head with a mallet doesn't help at all, so i am open to suggestions.

I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.

I have no doubt that Taylor Swift will call one day after suffering writers block: "Alfa, I was told that you were the person to call." I gotcha girlfriend.

In God's eye I spit, hair upon thy rigid tail sharp fangs glittery wet. Earth be thy sand, the sinful be thy toy, I've been playing forever, in song no longer do I find joy. In Gods eye I fight the bad fight with a goal as sharp as an axe, to ungently place thy hands upon its omnipotent thorax.

In my younger days dodging the draft, I somehow wound up in the Marine Corps. There's a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful. The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell." Page 68

Inspiration is the timid beast that comes to your open hand once you’ve fallen asleep having given up trying to coax it from its hiding place.

I then vowed to finally finish the years-late sequel to my best-selling book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I needed that money. My mother needed that money. I hadn't been able to finish the book because of the pathological fear that my sequel would be The Phantom Menace instead of The Empire Strikes Back. But, on the airplane, I thought, "Okay, okay, Phantom sucked, but it still made big cash. I'm gonna Yoda this book for my mother.