Anne Carson Quotes

You can fix anything but a blank page.

I can't really say - if I've run out of ideas until I've had my next set of ideas.

There will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP!

... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.

When you can't create you can work

writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks.

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."

It's vital to establish some rituals-automatic but decisive patterns of behavior-at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.

Inspiration and creativity, they ride right next to one anotherNot everyday are you going to wake up, the clouds are gonna part and the rays are gonna come downsometimes you gotta just get in there and force yourself to work and maybe something good will come out of it.

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.

Letting a project sit and coming back to it is just as important as working on it all the time. You need to come back to it with fresh eyes.

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

We all have fertile creative periods and times when we can't figure out how we ever did it.

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

If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

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

What do I do when writing isn't going well? Well, I don't write - which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I'm writing, "I'll fix it later." And sometimes it's true, I do.

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on

Wringin' your hands only stops you from rollin' up your sleeves.

For sure I think that at the end of the day if I got started a little sooner on stuff that was more written more permanent I would have just made a lot of mistakes earlier. I don't know if it would have led to earlier success but I think it would have led to thicker skin and it would have gotten the ball rolling.

I don't believe in writer's block. I don't know what that is. There are just certain little areas that I know I'm going to get through. It's just a matter of finding a way.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

The only thing I know for sure about the creative process is it always comes back. Magically. When there are no creative juices and nothing is coming to me - if I wait - it comes!