Top 45 Quotes About Writing Difficulty
#1. But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.
George MacDonald
#2. I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.
Ravi Shankar
#3. Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.
Samuel Johnson
#4. If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.
James Joyce
#6. I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced ...
Ernest Hemingway,
#7. Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms.
Bee Wilson
#8. A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.
Joseph Joubert
#9. It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#10. Every acting gig isn't the same, every writing job isn't the same, every live performance isn't the same - the challenge is the level of difficulty or ease, and that may vary.
Ricky Jay
#11. Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#12. Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.
Billy Collins
#13. The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.
Andrzej Wajda
#14. I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'
[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]
Philip Pullman
#15. I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.
Colson Whitehead
#16. In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.
Edward Abbey
#17. It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas,
Helen Keller
#18. Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
Ernest Hemingway,
#19. Writing is a profession that has no real career structure and your best advice when you hit a difficulty is probably going to come from another writer one or two rungs on the career ladder ahead of you.
Sara Sheridan
#20. I have a very hyper-sensitive sister, and when she saw in the papers the next day that I had proclaimed myself the daughter of an immigrant, she didn't like it at all, and was with difficulty deterred from writing to the press that my father might be an immigrant, but not hers.
Margaret Case Harriman
#21. Improve yourself by other men's writings thus attaining effortlessly what they acquired through great difficulty.
Socrates
#22. A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine.
Virginia Woolf
#23. The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
Winifred Holtby
#24. One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.
James Payn
#25. Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
Charles Caleb Colton
#26. The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words
not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable
Jacques Barzun
#27. My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making.
Sebastian Barry
#28. For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.
Adam Mansbach
#29. If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.
Mem Fox
#30. The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.
Khaled Hosseini
#31. When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I'm writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.
Isaac Asimov
#32. Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty ... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.
Thomas Jefferson
#33. People today are so accustomed to pretentious nonsense that they see nothing amiss in reading without understanding, and many of them at length discover that they can without difficulty write in like manner themselves and win applause for it. And so it perpetuates itself.
George Albert Wells
#34. The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.
Doris Lessing
#35. The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.
A.A. Milne
#36. From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.
- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic
Arthur Conan Doyle
#37. I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing.
Italo Calvino
#38. I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.
Jamaica Kincaid
#39. I have difficulty putting words in peoples' mouths. The best dialogue is very, very thin dialogue; you let people improvise and then basically you record what they've improvised and then write it down.
Steve McQueen
#40. There is, I think, great difficulty in writing of one's self: it is almost impossible to present subjects where the chief actor must be conspicuous and not seem to be, or really be, egotistical.
Dorothea Dix
#42. Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.
Joyce Carol Oates
#43. I have had quite a lot of prizes, but I don't think it makes any difference to the ease or difficulty to the writing process.
Ruth Rendell
#44. As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
Will Self
#45. Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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