#tin

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ↗

— Wally Lamb

#writers-quotes

Writer's block…a lot of howling nonsense would be avoided if, in every sentence containing the word WRITER, that word was taken out and the word PLUMBER substituted; and the result examined for the sense it makes. Do plumbers get plumber's block? What would you think of a plumber who used that as an excuse not to do any work that day? The fact is that writing is hard work, and sometimes you don't want to do it, and you can't think of what to write next, and you're fed up with the whole damn business. Do you think plumbers don't feel like that about their work from time to time? Of course there will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP. I like the reply of the composer Shostakovich to a student who complained that he couldn't find a theme for his second movement. “Never mind the theme! Just write the movement!” he said. Writer's block is a condition that affects amateurs and people who aren't serious about writing. So is the opposite, namely inspiration, which amateurs are also very fond of. Putting it another way: a professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#business

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. ↗

— Jacques Barzun

#writing #first-sentence

In a weak moment, I have written a book. ↗

— Margaret Mitchell

#writing-books

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost. ↗

— Thomas Bernhard

#writers-block #writing #writers-block

Then he went into the dining room, consulting his watch. It was ten thirty already. More than half the morning was gone. More than half the time for sitting and trying to write the prose that would make people sit up and gasp. It happened that way more often now than he would even admit to himself. Sleeping late, making up errands, doing anything to forestall the terrible moment when he must sit down before his typewriter and try to wrench some harvest from the growing desert of his mind. (“Mad House”) ↗

— Richard Matheson

#writer-s-block #writing #writers-block

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies. ↗

— Alice Weaver Flaherty

#poetry #writing #writers-block

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#writing #writers-block

Why do I keep evading my work? Is it because I’m afraid of being confronted by my lack of abilities? ↗

— Candace Bushnell

#work #writers-block #writing #writers-block

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. ↗

— D.A. Botta

#writers-block #writing #writist #writers-block