Quotes About Writer's block

Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.

I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

Sometimes in writing you have difficult periods and then other times it just flows.

I spend most of my days pacing around, muttering that I have no ideas, feeling like I'm walking a plank.

I feel like I spend most of my time in a state of writer's block! When things do come out, they come out quickly.

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

It's bad to get up early, stand at your typewriter and work, then find it's nothing and take a bottle to bed.

The position has been a work in progress in a lot of ways. Originally, there were certain minimum requirements. It was six public appearances a year, then write a poem for the state of Missouri. But they backed off of [the poem requirement]. They were concerned about writer's block, and they didn't want to encourage doggerel.

Writer's block? I've heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn't a writer anymore. I'm sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.

He tore it out and sat down to write a message. Pen was almost to paper when he stalled, as if he'd had the perfect thing to say but it floated out of his mind like vanished smoke. Sighing, he itched with irritation.

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

But all I had to show for the week was a blank sheet of paper. Maybe I could tell Ms. Gleason I had come up with a new kind of poem--the invisible kind.

And yet Curt's a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that's all.

People often ask where I get my ideas from, sometimes as often as eighty-seven times a day. This is a well-known hazard for writers, and the correct response to the question is first to breathe deeply, steady your heartbeat, fill your mind with peaceful, calming images of birdsong and buttercups in spring meadows, and then try to say, It's very interesting you ask that... before breaking down and start to whimper uncontrollably.

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

Writing is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent prevarication.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.

Writing is 90% procrastination. It is a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

You can live with me in this house I've built out of writers blocks.

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.

Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.