Edward Ruscha Quotes

Anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel... etc, etc.

I'm such a magpie. I'll get halfway through one thing and pick up something else. I always have 5 or 6 books open and spine-up by my bed: it's like a row of tents. I don't finish nearly as many books as I should.

I think it's just my nature. I can't work on one thing. I have to work on many things.

I'm the kind of person who will set time aside to do something and then do everything but that thing.

I have a short attention span. And when I'm in the middle of one thing, I'm then drawn to the next thing.

My biggest hurdle usually has to do with concentration. I have a tendency to kind of start working on something, and then, all of a sudden, I'll totally divert and do something totally different.

But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance.

One of my personality defects, perhaps, is that I'm rather ADD, and I work on a bunch of things at once.

This man will never finish anything. He thinks about the end before he thinks about the beginning.

I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.

I'm not, like, always focused; I'm very unfocused. I'm reading, and then I'm looking at my phone, and then I'm on the Internet.

Mike is the craziest person. He's scattered; he's all over the place. When you hold him down and tell him, 'This is what you're doing,' he's fantastic. But you have to hold him down. Like, when he had to write his verse for 'Hello Nasty,' we had to take his phone away to get him to do it.

Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.

I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

If I know somebody is coming 'round, it is incredibly difficult for me to work because I'm waiting for this interruption - even the children's comings and goings are interruptions. Cake-making is a good way of coming out of that space.

I'm on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It's great for jokes. But when I'm writing, I can't do anything else. I can't even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can't multitask.

I tend to write in coffee shops and restaurants with friends of mine because if I'm at home, I get distracted by the television or the cats or my husband, or... you know - all of those things that make it easy to procrastinate.

When the writing is going really well, whole days and weeks go by, and I suddenly realise I have all these unpaid bills and, my God, I haven't unpacked, and the suitcase has been sitting there for three weeks.

The horrible truth is that I am lazy and I am going to write and do bits that just hand themselves to me.

I need to have something else going on. I'm able to write a lot if I have an episode of 'Friday Night Lights' going on my computer.

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

I always interrupt work with other work, either in a small way or big way, so that's normal.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

Ever since I was twelve, I dreamed of being an author. I just never had the fortitude to see any of my stories through to completion. I would start a book, get a few chapters in, and grow bored or get distracted by something else.