And Writer S Block Quotes

#1. Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

Deb Caletti

#2. I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.

Lillian R. Melendez

#3. I don't believe in writer's block or waiting for inspiration. If you're a writer, you sit down and write.

Elmore Leonard

#4. - And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry - they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

Lawrence Block

#5. Writer's block comes from one's wanting only to write good stuff. Well, the good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.

Eric Olsen

#6. I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.

Anthony Kiedis

#7. The downs are the times when you lose sight of who you are and that happens along the way sometimes ... Writer's block when you doubt yourself and you get insecure.

Lights

#8. If I behave like a good boy and take my Prozac ... then I won't be able to write anymore.
I'll have Writer's block from not being able to communicate with the characters in my mind.

Timothy Pina

#9. Writer's block to me is where you stop because you're afraid to go forward because you're not sure of what really should be happening next and you think, my gosh, if I choose this ... you've got a hundred millions of avenues you could possibly go down but it's all an assess of characters.

Homer Hickam

#10. Don't let writers block push you around. Figure out what the problem is,whether it's with the ms or it's in your personal life, and face it head on. Don't stop writing. Just try really hard to work through it.

Darynda Jones

#11. I've had one experience of writer's block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.

Athol Fugard

#12. To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!

Ana Claudia Antunes

#13. The sculptor starts with a block of stone and imagines the creation within. The writer takes the reader's imagination and fashions his creation from without.

Mark A. Morris

#14. The first draft is for YOU, the writer; the second and subsequent drafts are for the reader. Trying to do both things at once - figuring out what we want to say, while also fashioning it for another human being to read - is the cause of writer's block.

Karen Karbo

#15. 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.

James N. Frey

#16. The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.

John Gardner

#17. If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read 'The Midnight Disease' by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain. I know what's wrong with me!

Dorothea Benton Frank

#18. If you've got writer's block, you aren't empty - maybe it's just like Twitter - overwhelmed, and loading seems to be taking a while ...

John Geddes

#19. I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.

Questlove

#20. I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Elton John

#21. I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.

Alan Garner

#22. I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

Julianna Baggott

#23. If you can't write, read.
If you can't read, walk.
Or walk and read, then write.

Joyce Rachelle

#24. I have yet to face Writer's Block and I don't believe I ever will. It is much more difficult for me to shut my imagination down to get a good nights sleep than it is to prod it to life.

Kenneth J. Ester

#25. There's no such thing as a writer's block. If you're having trouble writing, well, pick up the pen and write. No matter what, keep that hand moving. Writing is really a physical activity.

Natalie Goldberg

#26. I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

Joyce Carol Oates

#27. Gregory writes of Armageddon as if the Devil is getting off on using him literally to write that iniquitous beast into existence, into the flesh. I believe both Gregory and Jamie Stillingsworth are being used as vessels to bring about the end of days.

A.K. Kuykendall

#28. The Four Stages of Writer's Block
W.B. Stage I: I want to write but I can't.
W.B. Stage II: I have to write but I can't.
W.B. Stage I: I don't want to write but I have to.
W.B. Stage I: I don't have time for writing ... and, honestly, I don't feel like writing.

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#29. My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.

Mary Garden

#30. I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

Cynthia Kadohata

#31. If you're looking at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes to you, then go do something else. Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something.

Hugh MacLeod

#32. It is difficult for me to commit to an manuscript. Once, I get finished writing it. I get this feeling of adrenaline, and satisfaction. This is when the amusement begins, for the writer's side of me.

Mary Sage Nguyen

#33. Time heals all wounds; some broken hearts
and most cases of writer's block.

Quentin R. Bufogle

#34. (On her son) I've met writer's block. He is short, diapered and keeps unplugging my laptop. Good news: he can be conquered with a bottle and a nap.

Cyrese Covelli

#35. I don't get writer's block because I don't believe in it. I believe you sit in front of the computer and force your fingers to get something on the screen.

Janet Evanovich

#36. I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write ... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.

Jonathan Maberry

#37. When you're writing fulltime like I am, writing to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head and food on the table, you can't afford to have writer's block.

Brian Keene

#38. Sometimes ideas flow from my mind in a raging river of stringed sentences; I can scarcely scribble on the page fast enough to keep up with the mental current. Sometimes, however, beavers move in and dam the whole thing up.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#39. They told me I've got writer's cramp. So is that better than the block?

Joyce Rachelle

#40. I think living in Israel and wanting to change reality is the best prescription for never-ending writer's block.

Etgar Keret

#41. I'm not patient at all. I avoid writer's block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I've gotten to the next scene, I'll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.

Anders Holm

#42. Writing something new is an effective way to get rid of writer's block. Or you can observe the people around you and fantasize like I do.

B.A. Gabrielle

#43. But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

Adrienne Rich

#44. When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears
I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.

Irving Stone

#45. I don't have writer's block, really. I do have times when I can't get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don't write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone - the whole point of view.

Nora Ephron

#46. ARGH! There's no such thing [as writer's block]. Seriously: THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You know what there is? There's a bunch of problems, creative and otherwise, that can stop you writing. They are not block. They are important skills.

Nick Harkaway

#47. One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

Philip Sington

#48. I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression.

Saul Williams

#49. When faced with writer's block, lower your standards and keep going.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#50. I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. ("Advance Notice")

Richard Matheson

#51. I don't get writers block. I get writer has too many ideas and doesn't know which one to start next, block.

Tyler Hojberg

#52. I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.

Neil Gaiman

#53. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was expected to clock in at anywhere between 100 and 120 chapters. Unfortunately, the dude only managed to finish 24 tales before he suffered an insurmountable and permanent state of writer's block commonly known as death.

Jacopo Della Quercia

#54. I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

#55. Writer's block? A myth. It's your job, show up and do your job.

Caroline James

#56. I've never suffered from writer's block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I've always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I'll stop and look for another career.

J.G. Ballard

#57. I don't believe in writer's block. If I can't write, I go out and live. Then, if I'm a writer, I'll find something to write.

Peter Arpesella

#58. I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the problem is.

Cassandra Clare

#59. I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.

D.A. Botta

#60. This assignment could damn well project all the words across my face and the ink stain my hands a gory mess before I finished it.

Jazz Feylynn

#61. I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

Barbara Kingsolver

#62. I've never experienced writer's block. When it's going really well, my body temperature goes up, and I'm flushed. I get quite delirious.

M. J. Hyland

#63. I've only suffered writer's block badly once, and that was during the writing of Chamber of Secrets. I had my first burst of publicity about the first book and it paralysed me. I was scared the second book wouldn't measure up, but I got through it!

J.K. Rowling

#64. Never fails. Every new book I write seems impossible, writes like I'm typing from dictation, edits like I didn't write it, and finishes like I couldn't possibly have written it.

Kris Rafferty

#65. In mid-stroke of word and paper fusion

Jazz Feylynn

#66. Write because you love the work, not because of what might come from it. The journey is the purpose. Very Zen-like, I know, but honest to God it's the truth. And I have never had to deal with writer's block. Knock on wood.

William Kent Krueger

#67. I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!

Loudon Wainwright III

#68. Writer's block is as a depression in the earth. Like a river that flows into this depression for a time of rest and tranquility, eventually filling to continue its journey from the lower end of its shore line, so too shall your creative juices flow again.

Everett R. Lake

#69. I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.

Fred Saberhagen

#70. I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

Toni Morrison

#71. The trick to writer's block is to sack up and write through it, you see.

Jeph Jacques

#72. 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.

Warren Ellis

#73. With iPhones, nobody has an excuse for writer's block. If you're at Whole Foods getting your green tea extract and you have a melody, you just drop it into your voice memo and save it for later.

Ryan Tedder

#74. There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock.

Anne Lamott

#75. This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer's block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what's going on has really helped.

Thom Yorke

#76. I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

Martin McDonagh

#77. Writers have two main problems. One is writer's block, when words won't come at all, and the other is Logorrhoea, when the words come so fast that they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time.

Cecilia Bartholomew

#78. I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.

Jodi Picoult

#79. I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.

Sue Grafton