Terry Pratchett Quotes

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

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

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

Sometimes, if I don't write for a day or two, I get backed up - it's like constipation.

I'm certainly afraid of not being able to write for some reason. I guess I've had spells of not necessarily writer's block, but something like that. I find that pretty terrifying.

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.

They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited 'first chapters'. I have indeed written many.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

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

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.

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.

I used to write stories and poetry, but for some reason I have it in my head that if I'm going to write, I have to write a script.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

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.

If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.

You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.