Quotes About Struggle

We all have a fight - some an easy one, and some a big one, and if you have formed the idea that there is a kind of dividing line in the world, and that on the one side is the good, and on the other side the bad, why, all I can say is that you have a wrong notion of things.

It's a Hollywood screenwriting notion that change comes because of one epic, soul-crushing event... What's more common is that the slow decay of the nonevents of your life build up until you can't take it anymore.

It wasn't until I was 35 or 36, when I wrote 'Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,' that I began to get some notoriety, though I only made $5,000.

You get notoriety when you fight.

How could God give me a dream, a dream of going to Notre Dame, a dream of becoming somebody, and I'm a dummy, I'm nobody.

What nourishes me also destroys me.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.

I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.

My first novel took 12 years to complete because life got in my way.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

I wrote the worst novel ever.

Writing in a near frenzy is wonderful and freeing, but for me, it did not result in a nice, shiny novel. Instead, what I have is a mess.

Writing in a near-frenzy is wonderful and freeing but, for me, it does not result in a nice shiny novel. Instead what I have is a mess.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' about Michelangelo, and saying, 'No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.' I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.

I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.

I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.