Courtney Barnett Quotes

The roughest part for me when I'm writing a song is staring at a blank page. Where am I going from here? If you're a songwriter, you have to do that every time you start a song.

Sometimes something will come along, and it feels easy and sometimes you'll get 85 percent there on a song and the last 15 percent will elude you for three years.

I always thought writer's block was something that prats used as an easy excuse for not doing any work.

But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

Writing is like pulling your hair out. You have nothing, and you can't think of anything, but you have to think of something.

I've never liked songs that are about writing, or struggling to write. Maybe it's because it's too relatable to me.

The human mind is a wonderful thing, it starts working from before you're born and doesn't stop till you sit down to write a song.

It takes me a lot of time, and it's almost frustrating for the guys sometimes because they're waiting for a new song. And I - it's just so important for me to get the perfect, exact, right song.

Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

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.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

I get so fed up with the making of an album taking over my life - it's all I can think about or talk about. You find yourself in a rut and lacking inspiration and it's hard to get out of that because I'm working alone in the studio.

I got so I simply gagged everytime I sat before my desk to write an ad.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

I think I need the demons in order to write, but the demons have gone. It bothers me a lot. I've tried and tried, but I just can't seem to find a melody.

The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get.