Creative Avoidance Quotes

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I could give you absolutely sterling advice on how to avoid writing, how when you run out of things to do other than going to your desk and writing, when every closet is reorganized and you've called your oldest living relative twice in one day to see what she's up to and there isn't an unanswered e-mail left on your computer or you simply can't bear to answer another one and there is no dignity, not a drop left, in any further evasion of the task at hand, namely writing, well, you can always ask your dentist for a root canal or have an accident in the bathtub instead.

I don't know if I have some kind of defiance disorder or something, but if I'm hired to write something by "The Man," or by a studio, for whatever reason, it's really hard for me to finish. I inevitably wind up using that time to write something else.

In this world that we live in we have originality in literature, but we also have TV and movies. I write love stories. I could never write a love story based on the Titanic - that was never a novel. If I see an idea that's been done in film, I try to avoid that.

The real reason Milton went blind was to avoid reading unsolicited manuscripts.

The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.

Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others.

The worst storyline I've ever been involved in I wasn't involved in, because I was clever enough to get pregnant with my second child and they wrote me out and they replaced me with Christine Jones. And thank God - that was the worst storyline.

I'm an omniviorous reader, but I don't read what could overlap with my own work. It's like tuning a radio frequency - it's much harder to pick up if there's something else there.

I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil.

Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: over-researching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors - anything.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.