Terry Pratchett Quotes

That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

Why do I find it hard to write the next line?

Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

Expressing myself through language was always something that I had had to learn to do more so than others.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'

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.

I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

I usually write a lot. I don't make an album and don't write for two years and then end up with a blank paper starting over.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

'Monstress' has been hard because I want to keep writing longer, but I can't.

I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.

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?