Top 83 Writing Is Hard Work Quotes
#1. Writing is easy, good writing is hard and excellent writing is hard work.
G.H. Guzik
#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 work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.
David Ogden Stiers
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Writing is hard work. Attempting to write a decent story is friggin exhausting!
Veronica Purcell
#8. Acting is glamour but writing is hard work, so I'm going to be an actress.
Jacqueline Susann
#9. Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
E.B. White
#10. Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.
John Lutz
#11. Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies.
Christopher Darden
#12. Writing is hard work; it's also the best job I've ever had.
Raymond E. Feist
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.
Louise Bogan
#17. I think it's hard to make a living as a writer, but I think it's hard to work at McDonald's too ... I think the commitment is to get up everyday and say, "I'm a writer, therefore what I'm supposed to do today is write." And to do that, and to do that and to do that.
Pearl Cleage
#18. Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.
Shelby Foote
#19. I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.
Libba Bray
#20. Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.
Cheryl Strayed
#21. Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.
Wendelin Van Draanen
#22. My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.
George Saunders
#23. 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
#24. 185. Perhaps this is why writing all day, even when the work feels arduous, never feels to me like "a hard day's work." Often it feels more like balancing two sides of an equation - occasionally quite satisfying, but essentially a hard and passing rain. It, too, kills the time.
Maggie Nelson
#25. Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
Sue Grafton
#26. If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means that your vision can see so far that it's hard to come up to it. Again I say - the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.
Brenda Ueland
#27. Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.
Jane Rule
#28. In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft ...
Susi Moore
#30. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.
Katherine Paterson
#31. Well mostly in song writing my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#32. Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don't wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that.
Zoe Winters
#33. There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.
Mindy Kaling
#34. I use three main tools in writing: instinct, hard work and dumb luck. Dumb luck is missing a train and, while you wait for the next one, writing a key word, line or verse. When this happens often enough you begin to believe in Fate.
David Massengill
#35. The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
John Irving
#36. Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.
Aleksandra Ninkovic
#37. It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.
Elizabeth Strout
#38. Writing is wonderful. But it's hard work, so don't romanticize too much. Make the blinking cursor do its job.
Joseph LoGuidice
#39. Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.
Johnny Rich
#40. Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.
Maria Semple
#41. 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
#42. People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job.
Paul Theroux
#43. Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.
Ron Carlson
#44. Writing is hard, hard work; that's just the way it is.
Marissa Moss
#45. Singing always came naturally but the writing side is something I have always had to work hard at to get from good songs to great songs.
Andrew Ripp
#46. Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly.
Alasdair Gray
#47. Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
Anthony Powell
#48. No one likes to work for free. To copy an artist's work and download it free is stealing. It's hard work writing and recording music, and it's morally wrong to steal it.
Gary Wright
#49. I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good."--Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo
#50. Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.
Lewis Black
#51. Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream.
Sara Sheridan
#52. I do love writing. It doesn't come to me as readily as I think acting does. I think acting is in my instincts. Writing is a craft that I work very hard at. And I have to train and continue to develop.
David Dastmalchian
#53. It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.
Asa Larsson
#54. Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
Sarah Waters
#55. We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.
May Sarton
#56. 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
#57. The writing for me is hard work and I always look forward to drawing the pictures.
Marc Brown
#58. 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
#59. Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.
George Gershwin
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#68. I spend 60 hours a week on my business but I don't work for a minute. Work is hard. But what I do - writing, speaking, researching, learning, and sharing information - is pure joy. It's what I was called to do.
Carmine Gallo
#69. 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
#70. I feel I have to work hard to nurture whatever talent I have as an actor. I feel like it's not natural to me. So I don't take it for granted ... What I think is my natural ability - which is writing - I think I totally take that for granted.
David Duchovny
#71. Writing is easy. Writing well is hard work.
Amy Joy
#72. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.
Ernest Hemingway,
#73. A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.
Isabel Allende
#74. What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.
Virginia Woolf
#75. [Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions.
Rachel Carson
#76. A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
#77. One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.
Charlie Munger
#78. As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
Joyce Carol Oates
#79. The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.
Rachel Gibson
#80. Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Donald Hall
#81. 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
#82. Writing is not hard work, it is simply an obsession ...
Hallie Burnett
#83. Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
Jami Attenberg
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