Al Alvarez Quotes

I really hate to write.

I don't know if I have writing habits. Writing is impossible and every time I have to do it I kind of forget how.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

If I was going to write something, I'd need to stop for three months and just see if I had any thoughts in there.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

I write just knowing that I enjoy writing. But if I have to write, it seems like nothing comes. But when I go there for my own pleasure, the Lord might just give me loads of stuff all at once.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

One of my fears is not writing. I don't know how to do anything else.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you're trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.

Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I'm teaching, I'm focused on that.

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.