Richard Ayoade Quotes

When you're embarking on a piece of writing, the anxiety is just too much, especially when you're young and you're trying to figure out if this is your thing or not. You feel like, "if I don't write a good story, I gotta get going to law school!"

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.

I've always been a writer, actually. Not many people assume that, but I kinda keep quiet about anything that I do until I'm ready to show it. It keeps me humble and also makes me work towards a goal.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

I don't think I could form my writing into scripts or novels. It's so sporadic. My writing's pretty poor. I often think, "Who's this for?" Sometimes it's impressions of the day or my life, or it's fiction. Sometimes it's about things I want to remember, or I try to write in really awful French.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don't think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.

To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.

You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

I try to only work on the screenplays for a few hours a day when I'm in my most voluble mood, just sort of writing whatever comes into my head. It's a very freeing thing.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Singing other people's material was perceived, I think, as a weakness of my persona. The effect, though, was to make me dig my heels in and try even harder to combine the two.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.