Top 68 Quotes About How Hard Writing Is
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I'm a crap guitarist and I find it really hard writing on my own.
Siobhan Fahey
#13. I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
David McCullough
#14. 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
#16. As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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,
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Annie Dillard
#28. Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
Jonathan Stroud
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Writing day and night for months ... that's hard.
C.J. Cherryh
#43. 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
#44. Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.
Dorothy Day
#45. Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell - that's the hard part.
Jay Taylor
#46. 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
#47. Easy reading is the product of hard writing,
Stephen King
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.
Colm Meaney
#52. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#53. Once you've made your first feature, you know what you can do wrong and how hard it is to shoot a feature. Before you do it, you just don't know how hard it is. Once you've done it, when you're writing a second one, it's almost like you're preparing, and it's almost holding you back.
Mike Birbiglia
#54. Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
Ken Kesey
#55. You're not being paid by how hard you work, but by what you accomplish. If you can't hack it, pack it. Our challenge today is to look forward, to write our own history.
William A. Connelly
#56. A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
Sidney Sheldon
#57. No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.
Isabel Allende
#58. Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.
Amy Poehler
#59. Writing is hard ... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
Cheryl Strayed
#60. This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
Neil Gaiman
#61. Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.
Michelle Paver
#62. I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
Toni Morrison
#63. I can draw pencil lines to show something is moving, but if I'm writing, I struggle with how to write it. The boy ran down the hallway? The boy ran quickly down the hallway? The boy ran down the marble hallway? I agonize over the words. So my editor works very hard. I'm lucky to have her.
Brian Selznick
#64. I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good."--Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo
#65. How many people make a career out of writing anyway?' Cath snapped. She felt like everything inside her was snapping. Her nerves. Her temper. Her esophagus. 'I'll write because I love it, the way other people knit or ... or scrapbook. And I'll find some other way to make money.
Rainbow Rowell
#66. As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language.
Criss Jami
#67. Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' - which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was - losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
Stewart O'Nan
#68. Write for yourself, not for a perceived audience. If you do, you'll mostly fall flat on your face, because it's impossible to judge what people want. And you have to read. That's how you learn what is good writing and what is bad. Then the main thing is application. It's hard work.
Wilbur Smith
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