writer's mindset Quotes

I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.

I don't deal with writer's block, I don't allow myself to believe that there is such a thing. I think that there are good days and a lot more less good days.

When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!

While I'm writing, I'm far away; and when I come back, I've gone.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

I don't have anything to prove as a writer anymore. I write about Panera Bread or Red Lobster or Satan or Richard Ramirez or whatever comes to mind. I just write.

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

I don't think writers should have writer's block. I think they should write. Imagine you were a bus driver and you said, 'I've got bus driver's block.' Get over it.

I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.

Writing is a weird thing because we can read, we know how to write a sentence. It's not like a trumpet where you have to get some skill before you can even produce a sound. It's misleading because it's hard to make stories. It seems like it should be easy to do but it's not. The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

I didn't know how to be a writer. But I thought, 'I can do this.'

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.