Creative Drought Quotes

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write.

Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

Inevitably any series that goes on too long will reach a point where it starts struggling for ideas, so I've always been really aware of getting out while the going's good.

Don't crave fame, do what you do and just apply. I don't think many of them here today are that interested in fashion. Perhaps it's because there's not much going on. No punk, no reaction to something. I think we are in a waiting period.

The period of time between when you're done with a record and when you start touring is the worst period of a time in a musician's life.

I had writer's block for almost a year.

Writer's block is for people who have the luxury of time.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.

I understand from my own work that haste makes waste. But I also understand that ... the creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn’t produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.

By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.

I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on.

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

There's nothing in the recent past I want to write about.

I remember that when I was in my 30s, a hot age for an actress, lots of offers were coming in, but nothing was great, and I didn't work for 18 months. It was at a really fruitful age, and I wanted to work. There was nothing coming down the pipeline that I thought was good - and then I got 'The Piano.'

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

I go through long periods of time when I don't write, and I'm fine.

One of my big fears is drying up, and the more I create, the more I feel myself shrinking beneath the backlog of work I've done.

The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

Woody Allen would go for seven years without a movie and then make one that makes no money.