Top 100 Writing Is Hard Quotes
#1. Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
#2. Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.
Dorothy Day
#3. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#4. Writing is easy, good writing is hard and excellent writing is hard work.
G.H. Guzik
#5. I would be an actress for the rest of my life just because it's really relaxing. Writing is hard work, and stand-up is so stressful before you get on stage, but acting is a complete ensemble experience.
Kristen Schaal
#6. Writing is hard. That's why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.
[There Is No Such Thing as Writers' Block: Blog post, October 7, 2001]
Andy Ihnatko
#7. Writing is hard work, not magic. It begins with deciding why you are writing and whom you are writing for. What is your intent? What do you want the reader to get out of it? What do you want to get out of it. It's also about making a serious time commitment and getting the project done.
Suze Orman
#8. Writing is easy. Writing is hard. It's a breeze and a struggle, just like life.
Dennis R. Miller
#9. 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
#10. Writing is hard ... It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it's no longer a hobby, it's no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.
Karina Halle
#11. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
#12. Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.
Roger Angell
#13. Writing is hard work; it's also the best job I've ever had.
Raymond E. Feist
#15. Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies.
Christopher Darden
#16. Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.
John Lutz
#17. Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
E.B. White
#19. Acting is glamour but writing is hard work, so I'm going to be an actress.
Jacqueline Susann
#20. Writing is hard work. Attempting to write a decent story is friggin exhausting!
Veronica Purcell
#21. I try to do as little as possible without looking like an idiot. Research is fun and easy. Writing is hard. So I try not to let the research become an excuse to not do the writing part.
Zachary Lazar
#22. Writing is hard work, and fun, and requires you to keep your backside in a chair when you would sometimes like to put it elsewhere. So the only wisdom is the advice to keep at it, I guess.
Lois Lowry
#24. Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
William Zinsser
#25. Sometimes writing is hard. You know what's not hard? Watching Netflix. That's easy.
Beth Revis
#27. Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.
David Ogden Stiers
#28. Writing is hard, hard work; that's just the way it is.
Marissa Moss
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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,
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Annie Dillard
#42. Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
Jonathan Stroud
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Easy reading is the product of hard writing,
Stephen King
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#57. 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
#58. It is also hard to write about a city we just moved to; it's not yet in our body.
Natalie Goldberg
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Many people think that it is important to have a title before you begin writing the book, but I think you should never sit around waiting for the right title to strike before you start writing. Crack on with the story, put in the hard work, and the title will come eventually.
Darren Shan
#62. Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.
Lewis Black
#63. Writing in the dark is hard, but you have to light your own candle and do it anyway.
A.D. Posey
#64. Writing is such a weird emotional thing. It's hard. If you sit down with a plan to write something, it's going to be harder.
Lauren Miller
#65. It is hard to write about politicians, see them at such close range, and still think of any of them as heroes.
Robert Novak
#66. About as much business as a cat owner has selling dog food. Or an Olympic swimmer has advertising for downhill ski equipment. Or a nun writing hard core erotica.
Abso-fucking-none.
Laurel Ulen Curtis
#67. When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
Charles Bukowski
#68. The only way to learn and hone your craft is by working hard and writing regularly.
Darren Shan
#69. Witty and mean is easy - but fond and funny is hard.
Steven Moffat
#70. I definitely fall in love quickly, and I'm very in love with being in love. But it is hard for me to write about love.
Melanie Martinez
#71. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview]
Ray Bradbury
#72. I think of myself first as a singer, meaning an interpreter. Then I think of myself as a writer. It is an outlet I have to have. I get very hard to live with without something happening to write about.
Oliver
#73. My family was always playing with words. It is little wonder that even after I got serious about writing, I've had a hard time getting serious about words.
James Howe
#75. I wish other people would write about loneliness more. It's hard to remember that it's not personal. We live in a world that is built to make people lonely ... It's difficult to remember that your loneliness is not really about you and everyone has it.
Jessa Crispin
#76. Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... )
Charles Stross
#77. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.
Mark Vonnegut
#78. Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.
Padgett Powell
#79. Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?
Darin Strauss
#80. It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
John Grisham
#81. Music business is hard. It's very difficult. And it's not for everyone. Even if you can sing or even if you can write a song, it takes a lot of determination, it takes some kind of thick skin.
John Legend
#82. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.
Aaron Swartz
#83. It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.
What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
#84. 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
#85. I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see.
Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
Anne Lamott
#86. There's no "magic secret"; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day - bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#87. Sometimes with certain writing, you feel like you've got to be literal, hit it hard on the nose, just to get the point across. Good writing is more subversive I think - or good scenes. They are about one thing on the page but you can make it about something completely different.
Chace Crawford
#88. It's very hard to write about that which is always beautiful and pleasant and good. You don't get anywhere with it. There's no friction in it. There's no trouble. You have to have trouble. Somebody's got to get in trouble, or no one wants to read it.
Paul Bowles
#89. Writing a book is easy, getting people to read it is the hard part.
Jordon Sagel
#90. The writing for me is hard work and I always look forward to drawing the pictures.
Marc Brown
#91. Do that, and the best you can hope for is that people will ignore you. More realistically, you'd be skinned alive, or possibly sentenced to ten year hard labor writing microcode for waffle irons and toaster ovens.
Scott Meyers
#92. Writing is easy. Writing a publishable book is hard.
Eliza Green
#93. I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.
Laurie Foos
#94. People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.
Kate Morton
#95. I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.
Nell Zink
#96. I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it's disheartening; you don't want to go on. That's what I think is hard - the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done.
James Salter
#97. 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
#98. File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.
Antony Johnston
#99. Richard A. Posner is an extraordinary person. If he did not exist, it would be hard to believe that he could. ( ... ) He writes with a flair that puts most journalists to shame and a depth of knowledge that puts most professors to shame.
Alan Ryan
#100. The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.
Ned Beauman
