Creative Toil Quotes

When I wrote "Win," it only took about eight months, but eight months of sheer pain and suffering because every phrase that's in there - and there are about 130 specific linguistic recommendations - I had to test every one to make sure that it worked.

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.

Now literary success can only be won in solitude by persevering labor.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

Movies are really hard to make. You put a lot of work into them, and you want people to see them.

I don't think a lot of people really know what goes into something that they see.

They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

My family has artists, but they are all working artists. They are not movie stars. They don't get paid. I really respect that blue-collared ideology where they're just trying to make a living.

A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.