Toni Morrison Quotes

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.

What to do when inspiration doesn't come; be careful not to spook, get the wind up, force things into position. You must wait around until the idea comes.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.

I'm not really worried about writer's block.

For years and years, I would sit in my studio, and I wouldn't have any inspiration. I'd write one or two songs a year.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

People say, "How do you write songs?" I say, "Patience." I may have a track that's hot, but no words. I'll just let it sit for years, because I know they're going to meet. They'll find it.

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

I think everything has its place. So if the ideas or the fluidity isn't coming in writing, maybe it's related to ingestions.

Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

... 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.

Sometimes writing songs is like waiting for deliveries.

Worry destroys the ability to write.

I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

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

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.