Ron Rash Quotes

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.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

I hate everything about writing except doing it.

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

There's nothing more painful than writing.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

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

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.

It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.

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'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.