Junot Diaz Quotes

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.

When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.

Completing any writing project, particularly a novel, is a daunting prospect. Many people become frozen by the prospect. Others keep waiting for the right time. Some wait for the spark of inspiration. Even experienced writers find it is easier to do anything other than actually write.

When I can't write, it depresses me.

I spent six years after my first novel and five years after my second without getting into a new book.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

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.

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'

It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again.

I found, after the experience of making 'Shaun Of The Dead' and then returning to the blank page - because 'Shaun Of The Dead' was the first screenplay I ever wrote properly - the experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful.

There are so many projects that I've written and had to abort because either I felt too distressed by what I was doing to the people who I was writing about, or they couldn't cope with it because their view of themselves was so far removed from reality.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

When I finish a book, I always fear that I'll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else - but nothing else makes me as happy.

I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

I had a year of panic attacks. I was feeling really pressured, like I could never do it again. With a first novel, you put things on hold because it takes so much mental energy and self-belief to keep on writing.

I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't.

I have a horror of going down dead ends, which you can easily do with a novel, spending months on it and then realising that it's all wrong. It's demoralising, because you don't get the time back.

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.