Writing Stress Quotes

Meditation is a really powerful tool I have for life now. The only reason I know about it is because I was stressing about writing and a friend taught me it. It's been useful.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

Your brain is cooked when you write hard for three or four hours.

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.

I get really tense during the first draft. Really tense. That's not great for my family, because the first draft usually takes about a year.

When I type 'The End,' it's like being paroled from prison.

I'm never doing a long novel again, truly.

Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.

I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life-the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes-ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

I am very aware of the fact that it's highly unlikely anyone will write an article via their mobile phone. I've done it, but it's painful. And it's not just about the small keyboard and the small screen - though that's awful. It's the emotional experience of writing an article.

You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.

If I wasn't plagued by needing to write things, that would perhaps be a blessing.

It's a weird business. You're trying to write something that's built on magic, which is pretty stressful.

Anybody who writes knows the horrible, wonderful, beautiful foulness that comes every week. A lot of moaning, screaming agony - "Oh my god, the deadline's coming."

For any writer, a red pen is such a trigger.

I think writers are very anxious.