Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.
If I were a first rate writer, I wouldn't mind a bit. What does depress me is this: it is so desperately hard and so obsessive and so lonely to write that, in return for all this work, one would like a little self satisfaction. And that is never going to come, for the simple reason that I do not deserve it. I cannot be a good enough writer. You see? I call it grim. But the future looks awfully clear to me.
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Writing is not fun.
I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.
Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
I have a lot of respect for people who write a whole book because I've heard it will kill you.
So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain... and retain.
I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page - sometimes every word as well.
I have always found writing very difficult.
Right now with blogs and the flood of internet access, a multitude of aspiring writers think they're ready for prime time. They're not. Be great. Read. Write. Bust your ass. Learn and find your voice. As hard as you think it is, it's a hundred times harder.
Stand-up has the best writers, because it's the hardest writing by a million miles.
I'll sing over some chords, searching, what does [the music] conjure up, where's the melody taking you? I deliberate over the lyrics, I really do. I'll come up with one line in a day, and then it might be a couple of days before I come up with the rhyming line. It's never been easy for me.
Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.
