Paul Shaffer Quotes

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

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.

Writing has never been that simple for me.

But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.

I enjoy writing but I much prefer the experience of having written.

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.

I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?

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

I need therapy after writing. It's like leaking blood from a stone. It's brutally difficult but worth it.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

With 'Free Agent Nation,' I was figuring out how to write a book along with writing the book. Now I think I've kind of, sort of figured out how to write a book a little bit better. But the process remains not that different - slow; laborious; tiny, incremental progress each day, punctuated by feelings of despair and self-loathing.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

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.

'The Rose Society' was definitely the hardest book I've ever written, because it's so difficult to stay in that dark space.

Sometimes every single element of a character is a torturous discovery.

I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.

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

Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

I think that you just understand, as any creative person, that there's a beast that you have to beat, and it never goes away. I've resigned myself to that, and it's kind of what keeps you going. Writing is the worst and the best.