Quotes About Process

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

I'm not worried about good numbers or bad numbers. You worry about the process.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

I call it a process of elimination. You're nurturing ideas, and that takes time. What happens is there's so many, what I say, 'great ideas.' What you have to do is try to consolidate them and put them into one song, and then your song becomes eight minutes long.

It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process.

I don't really have a metaphor for how I write, but it kinda feels like chipping away at a big dark object that I can't really see.

When you sign your letter of intent to go to college you kind of sign away, and understand that you have certain rules and obligations that you have that normal students don't have... it's part of the process, being apart of the university and what you represent.

Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

Making a cartoon occupied usually about three full days, two spent in labour and one in removing the appearance of labour.

Writing a novel is the closest thing a male writer will ever get to the experience of childbirth.

I don't try to analyze my style now or I might lose it. Right now it's automatic and I don't want to become too conscious of it.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. —Margaret Atwood

The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet.

The clay can become a bear," she said, "but not as long as it rests cold and wet in the riverbank.

Expendable Ram says, 'Good.'" "Expendable Ram can eat poo," said Rigg. "All expendables can process any organic matter they ingest and extract energy from it.

The perfection is not so much in the performance as in the journey towards it. This is the joy. You must burn!

Most people, if you describe a train of events to them will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.

Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.

Writing is very subconscious and the last thing I want to do is think about it.

The actual process of thinking -in any discipline- is an unconscious affair...The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access.

Otto von Bismarck quipped, Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better.