Chris Lilley Quotes

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.

I've never been a fast writer.

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.

I'm a very slow writer.

I write so slowly, I could write with my own blood and not hurt myself.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

I'm pretty slow at writing papers.

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.

I'm just very, very slow. I would not make it as a journalist, I've got to tell you. I sweat bullets over every sentence, and sometimes, you know, a day will pass and I've written one paragraph, and I've been at the computer for four hours.

I find writing extraordinarily difficult and not very pleasurable, though I find having done it very pleasurable. I won't lie about that.

For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.

I am not - thank heavens - one of those 'driven' writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.

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

There's no such thing as easy, but it's easier when a script is good.

I don't write quickly, and I don't want to.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.