Edmund White Quotes

I really hate to write.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

I hate writing.

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.

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

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it.

I can't read fiction when I'm writing fiction, because I get intimidated if I read something really good.

I'm pretty slow at writing papers.

I've learned never to try and force words to come.

I write pretty much year-round, but I definitely do more when a deadline is looming.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.

I can't write every day. I have to skip a day in between. If I try to do it every day, nothing comes.

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.

I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.

I've thought about writing, but it hasn't happened yet. It's like schoolwork - you start doing your revisions two nights before you're compelled to turn it 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.

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

I've been taking longer to write stories lately.

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.