Top 100 Hard Writing Quotes
#1. I'm a crap guitarist and I find it really hard writing on my own.
Siobhan Fahey
#2. Easy reading is the product of hard writing,
Stephen King
#3. Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#4. Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
Maya Angelou
#5. But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.
Jack Vance
#11. Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
William Zinsser
#13. Thinking about writing isn't writing. Planning to write isn't writing. Neither is talking about it, posting about it, or complaining how hard it is. These may be part of the process. But only writing is writing.
Jack Ketchum
#14. Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.
Mary Lee Settle
#15. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan
#16. You can write and visualize goals all you want, but if you do not take action, your goals will never become a reality. To obtain a goal you have never before achieved will require tasks you have never before done.
Cameron C. Taylor
#17. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.
Katie Roiphe
#18. I find it hard to express myself when writing from the f - - - heart or the a - , or wherever. It's just like anything, it's (easier) when you get used to it, but I've not done it. I was just a singer in a band.
Liam Gallagher
#19. The shock of recognition is a moment of excitement that shakes the soul. It may be hard to describe, but like other forms of love, you will know it when you feel it.
Stephen Koch
#20. I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up.
John Legend
#21. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#22. I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults.
Lynne Reid Banks
#23. When people ask that question, it's very hard to nail down a formula or a circumstance that I always write in, but I definitely do believe that there have been moments, musically, when I have channeled something, you know?
Kimbra
#24. I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
David McCullough
#25. I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
Lisa Scottoline
#27. As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
#28. Writing is too goddamned hard for me to think about a soul in teh world ... I don't think about a soul, but just try to get those goddamned characters to act right.
Ernest J. Gaines
#29. If you don't allow yourself the possibility of writing something very, very bad, it would be hard to write something very good.
Steven Galloway
#30. Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
#32. To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.
Ruth Reichl
#33. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
#34. Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.
Katrina Monroe
#35. I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.
Jane Yolen
#37. Don't for once ever think that what you're doing is easy. If it feels that way, you're probably doing something wrong. Throwing words onto a page is easy. But writing, the real kind, is hard. It's damn hard.
Allison M. Dickson
#38. Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Annie Dillard
#39. Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
Jonathan Stroud
#40. The only thing that's helped me get through some really hard times was just being able to write and express - it's very cathartic for me. I'm hoping that, by writing and performing for other people, it affects them the same way.
Sharon Van Etten
#41. It's so easy to write songs about misery and hard times and sadness. It's much more difficult to write songs about happy and chirpy stuff.
Elton John
#42. I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.
David Byrne
#43. I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Megan Abbott
#44. An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they're creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can't make it better.
Johnny Rich
#45. Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
Brian A. McBride
#46. It's always really hard to kill off someone who you just really enjoy working with, writing for, and seeing on the screen.
Marc Guggenheim
#47. Writing is not glamorous - it's hard work. If you want to be a glamorous writer, wear purple nail varnish when you type.
Sue Cross
Sue Cross
#48. I ended up at fifty, over-the-hill, thinking I had no future. Finally, I realized that I had allowed myself to write less than I could ... As writers true to ourselves, it will always be hard, and if we're good, we'll always be in trouble. Let's be sure we deserve it.
Waldo Salt
#49. I don't actually have to think very hard when I'm writing. I mean, there are times where it's a task, and you have to plug away and plug away. But then there are times when a song writes itself in 15 minutes, and you're just struggling to keep up with it.
Patty Griffin
#50. Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.
W. W. Rouse Ball
#51. I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk. I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.
Maria Semple
#52. To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.
Brian K. Vaughan
#53. Writing day and night for months ... that's hard.
C.J. Cherryh
#54. The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
H.L. Mencken
#55. Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.
Dorothy Day
#56. Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell - that's the hard part.
Jay Taylor
#57. I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.
Ted Chiang
#58. It's certainly hard to find fault with a work that quotes Shakespeare, Homer, and a dirty limerick about "the young man from Oswego.
Simon Sheppard
#59. With directing, you have to wake up early, which stinks, but you get to hang out with the crew, you're laughing, you're active, and you're working with the actors. It's just more fun than writing. Writing is very hard.
Amy Sherman-Palladino
#60. I feel so fortunate to get paid to be an actor. I pinch myself. I get it from writing, I get it from baking, gardening ... I sort of open myself to the creative flow, which is hard to do, by the way.
Lauren Bowles
#61. A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.
Colm Meaney
#62. I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#63. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#64. Sometimes I'll write a song. When I've gone through something really hard in my life, sometimes it's other people's music. Other times it's actually writing the songs and getting out of mind and into the song.
Jack Johnson
#65. You can't really discover the most interesting conflicts and problems in a subject until you've tried to write about them. At that point, one discovers discontinuities in the data, perhaps, or in one's own thinking; then the act of writing forces you to work harder to resolve these contradictions.
Anthony F. C. Wallace
#66. With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.
Amish Tripathi
#67. When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.
David Longstreth
#68. I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.
Karen Russell
#69. I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.
George Pelecanos
#70. Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.
Kate Christensen
#71. A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.
Dan Chaon
#72. I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like.
Jennifer Fallon
#73. One of the problems of writing and working and looking at the Internet is that it's very hard to separate fashion from deep change.
Yochai Benkler
#74. There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What
Steven Pressfield
#75. One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.
Patricia C. Wrede
#76. Do it because it's in your heart. Not because you want something in return. Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
Socrates
#77. It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
Junot Diaz
#78. The reason why people think of programming as being hard is because you're writing down a general rule which is going to be used for lots of instances that a particular instance must process correctly.
Gerald Jay Sussman
#79. Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.
Sarah Colliver
#80. There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.
Tom Pappalardo
#81. I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.
Joyce Carol Oates
#82. My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
#83. It's so damn hard to write a great historical mystery based on fact. It's not for lack of trying.
Jon Turteltaub
#84. You'll love Philadelphia," she said. "But watch out for the ladies who are putting on your shin-dig. There's a romance writing group near here in Erie, and let me just say - we've been called out to a few of their parties. Some of those chicks are decently hard-core.
K.C. Dyer
#85. Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.
Yann Martel
#86. The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be.
Marina Warner
#87. I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.
William Finnegan
#88. It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it's not yet in our body.
Natalie Goldberg
#89. Right now I feel so inspired, it's hard to believe. I've written about 20 songs in the last two days. I'd gone about four months without writing a thing.
Tommy Bolin
#90. 'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#91. I'm not used to writing about happy emotions, I'm just used to pulling from my sad or angry - happy emotions are very hard for me to portray in music.
Melanie Martinez
#92. In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
David Bergen
#93. Characters aren't a fling. They aren't a one-night stand. Getting to know them takes time and hard work. It takes excessive free writes and multiple experiments.
Margaret Foley
#94. I've always thought that writing isn't really that hard. It's having a good idea that's hard.
Lyle Lovett
#95. It's hard to imagine my life not writing. I love it.
Chris Crutcher
#96. Writing is easy, good writing is hard and excellent writing is hard work.
G.H. Guzik
#97. Sure, it will be hard, but all you need to be a writer is perseverance, a low-level alcohol dependency, and a questionable moral compass.
Anna Kendrick
#98. The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#99. I see caring for somebody as a creative outlet. I like drawing little faces and writing little stories and hiding them in places. I don't think it's that hard to be thoughtful, especially when you do care about the person.
Channing Tatum
#100. You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it's really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.
Diane Setterfield
