Top 86 Writing Is Not Easy Quotes
#1. I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers.
Jackie Collins
#2. With writing music, as a general rule I'm looking for something that surprises me, that doesn't fall within what's easy for me.
John Maus
#3. If I find out I have to write today and nothing else, that's a perfect day. I know a lot of people who are great at it and make it look easy who are tortured and miserable people. Writing for me is perfect peace.
Joss Whedon
#4. There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.
Colm Meaney
#5. Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.
Robert C. Martin
#6. All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
William, Saroyan
#8. Her life had been too safe to need courage, and too easy to develop resolve.
Stephen T. Harper
#9. Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.
Derrick Jensen
#10. I think if you write humor, then people don't - you know - they don't give you that much credit. They tend to think you just dictate your stories into a tape recorder. And I'm not necessarily insulted by that, because I think that just means that it looks easy.
David Sedaris
#11. It's not easy to writing thank-you notes for the stuff you didn't want in the first place.
Jeff Kinney
#12. Witty and mean is easy - but fond and funny is hard.
Steven Moffat
#13. If you think it's easy to write jokes about fried calamari, you've probably never tried.
Scott Adams
#14. Writing without words? Its not easy, I tell you! I stab the pen into my heart and let the blood flow. No more ink, no more words, no more b.s. Just me.
Allison Mackie
#15. Buying insurance is no one's idea of fun. And it's especially easy to berate something as funky-sounding as writing checks to defend our neighborhoods against apartment-size rocks from space. But this is one insurance pitch that makes perfect sense. Ask the dinos.
Seth Shostak
#16. When you're writing a song and there are five people invested in it, it's easy for one person to say, 'Oh, this song is about this and that', and everyone has to hear the idea and see if they can do better.
Jason Mraz
#17. Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel. They are easy to build. Films are overwhelming in their magnitude and scope. By comparison, a lot of film directors wish they were writing songs because you can do it while getting your hair cut.
Tom Waits
#18. Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.
Mark Twain
#19. Editing one's writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle.
Fennel Hudson
#20. It was relatively easy to write 'The Cave of Lost Souls', though, because it came to me one night in a dream. I remember waking up and having this idea for a complete story - from start to finish - in my head, so I jotted it down, then later began writing the thing.
Paul Kane
#21. 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
#22. I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a ... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.
Sharon Olds
#23. It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.
Samuel Johnson
#24. Writing is a lot of fun for me; that's not to say it's easy, but I really do enjoy it.
Donald Driver
#25. I'm telling you, writing the book is easy. The after part will break your back. Not to mention your heart.
Suzy Soro
#26. Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.
Stephen Leacock
#27. One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer.
John Green
#28. [I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#29. It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.
Naveen Andrews
#30. Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall.
Christie Purifoy
#31. Sometimes writing is hard. You know what's not hard? Watching Netflix. That's easy.
Beth Revis
#32. Why write if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bullfighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile and two-horned topics?
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#33. 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
#34. Writing is easy, good writing is hard and excellent writing is hard work.
G.H. Guzik
#35. It is well to write love letters. There are certain things for which it is not easy to ask your mistress face to face, like money for instance.
Henri De Regnier
#36. It's so easy to think that this [celebrity] is reality; that people are lining up outside just to write down what I have to say. That's not real; that's weird.
Jennifer Lawrence
#37. No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.
Clarice Lispector
#38. It's not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn't.
Guy Ritchie
#39. I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.
Dean Young
#40. Writing is not that easy, but it's obviously fun and I like it.
Alvi Syahrin
#41. When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.
Vivian Gornick
#42. It is not easy writing someone a postcard. The size and shape of the card cut you down to size ...
Ron Padgett
#43. Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another "Rosenkavailer."
H.L. Mencken
#44. And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.
Matt LeBlanc
#46. It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.
Jostein Gaarder
#47. I refuse to do anything easy. I'm writing for the smartest person out there. I'm not equating myself with the smartest person out there, but hopefully I'm writing to say you're not alone. I'm not alone. We're not alone.
Larry Gelbart
#48. Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
Witold Gombrowicz
#49. 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
#50. My experiences always influence my writing, but usually only on an emotional level. I have experienced death of a family member and it's easy to dredge up those feelings and get them on the page.
Kim Smith
#51. When I write lyrics, it's only when I'm angry or hurt or sad. So lyrically it's never really easy going. And the music is always really intense.
Henry Rollins
#52. Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Annie Dillard
#53. 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
#54. Writing is challenging work because it's so easy to get consumed with how it's going, what's going to happen to it, who's going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.
Wayne Dyer
#55. Writing is the birth of my closure. Either it splits me open and comes out easy with tears or it pushes me to hysterics. Whichever way, it brings me a new life.
Sandra Proto
#56. Easy reading is the product of hard writing,
Stephen King
#57. 'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.
Jerry Leiber
#58. I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!
Edan Lepucki
#59. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
Octavia Butler
#60. The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.
Jodi Picoult
#61. Writing a book isn't an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life's most satisfying achievements.
Guy Kawasaki
#62. Dude, writing, acting and directing are such easy jobs. But to do them all as awesomely as Zach Braff does, well that ... that's something.
Zach Braff
#64. Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
Bret Easton Ellis
#65. Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.
Joe Elliott
#67. It's easy to get discouraged; just keep writing because you love to do it, and you'll keep improving.
Suzanne Weyn
#68. Writing or talking about famine and the world's response to it is not very easy.
William Shawcross
#69. When you have nothing left to lose, it's easy to dive deep into those deep, dark hidden places and write your truth. I'm there.
Lori Lesko
#70. Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#71. Something good happened to my writing when I stopped being afraid to do something simple, for the fear that people might think I couldn't do something more complex. Don't be confused by the word simple. Simple is not easy, it is clear voiced, and fearlessly elegant.
Carrie Newcomer
#72. Writing is easy, its marketing that is truly hell!
L.A. Jones
#73. It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.
Arthur Schnitzler
#74. Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.
Red Smith
#75. I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.
Armando Iannucci
#76. Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons.
Marcia Muller
#77. I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.
Brian K. Vaughan
#78. 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
#79. My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.
Philip Glass
#80. None of it was ever easy, but that wasn't the point. I had never asked writing to be easy; I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#81. 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
#82. Two easy steps to be a good writer:
1. Don't write what everyone is writing.
2. Write what everyone is trying to write.
Himanshu Chhabra
#83. And the writers are good in that it's easy to memorize, and good writing has an innate rhythm to it. And I've always felt that it's easier to get in your head than writing that has very kind of mind busting moments.
Glenn Close
#84. David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#85. Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.
Steven Hall
#86. I think we're on a journey ... It was very easy to write about my past in my book, but writing about the present is all a new chapter. I hope that people find this journey fascinating, informative and educational.
Donna Karan
