Writing Is Work Quotes

#1. I don't enjoy writing newspaper articles any more than people like reading them. I'm a standup comic, not a journalist, although sometimes onstage I will say: 'What else is in the news?' Writing is work, which I'm not comfortable with.

Andy Kindler

#2. Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them.

Rosamunde Pilcher

#3. Writing is work and cooking is relaxing.

Diane Mott Davidson

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

George Orwell

#7. And the reason you hate writing so much is because you start analyzing your work before you're done pouring it onto the page. Your Left-brain won't let your Right-brain do it's job ... Your Right-brain gets the words on the page. The Left-brain makes them sing.

Jeff Bollow

#8. In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around.

Michael Kosser

#9. Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.

Joan Didion

#10. Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

Walter Benjamin

#11. I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.

Gail Carriger

#12. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.

Eduardo Galeano

#13. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.

H. Raven Rose

#14. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

Cheryl Strayed

#15. So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.

Pliny The Younger

#16. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

Jamie L. Harding

#17. Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.

Richard LaGravenese

#18. Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

Tom Robbins

#19. One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

Toni Morrison

#20. Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work.

Hermione Lee

#21. Mark Twain on George Ade's writing: I have been reading him [Ade] again, and my admiration overflows all limits. How effortless the limning! It is as if the work did itself, without help of the master's hand.

George Ade

#22. 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

#23. Writing is a consciousness formally at work in the territory of the imaginary.

Nicole Brossard

#24. The best advice I can give to any aspiring author is to write every single day. Work at the craft of writing. Take it seriously.

Andrea Davis Pinkney

#25. I usually work seven days a week and rarely take vacations, which is both lame and unsustainable. I don't mind the idea of writing seven days a week, I suppose. Getting some work done early in the morning. But ideally I would love to take one day a week off.

Brad Listi

#26. Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

Meagan Spooner

#27. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.

Robert Black

#28. My first love is writing and producing. So I sometimes put my own stuff off to work on other people's projects.

Missy Elliott

#29. It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.

Maira Kalman

#30. Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

Joan Didion

#31. 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

#32. It's a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one's work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious." Martha

Erik Larson

#33. I am very present in my work and my work is somehow an expression of my soul, but at the same time I think that a writer cannot write out of nothing.

Paulo Coelho

#34. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

Kathe Koja

#35. 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

#36. The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.

George Stephen

#37. I'm very excited to work with everybody on 'The Bridge' - the cast, the writing staff, the executive producers - the show is really good. I'm very lucky to be a part of it.

Brian Van Holt

#38. The aspiration of all writers should be to avoid leaving fissures in their work, to make sure that everything is properly secured so readers won't find a single toehold for their suspicions.

Marcos Giralt Torrente

#39. Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

Dorothy Day

#40. The world is corrupt, and the way for me to make it better is not by writing letters, but joining my efforts with those of others to produce a work of beauty.

H.S. Ede

#41. I enjoy writing the same way I enjoy doing standup. Part of the challenge is being creative and making it work no matter what the constraints.

Greg Fitzsimmons

#42. The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context.

Sarah Gadon

#43. My background is really being a writer's actor - that seems to be the way I work best, bringing out the best of writing. There's a whole range of acting skills, and some people can be astonishing with very poor material. That's not me; my skill is essentially unlocking the writing.

Lindsay Duncan

#44. Hen, there's such a temptation to just constantly write things that are going to make the fans happy. Sometimes it takes a little bit of unhappiness to make those happy pay-offs work better. That's something that is fascinating to us and I think has really changed the way that stories are told.

Jeff Pinkner

#45. 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

#46. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

John Irving

#47. The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

Blaise Pascal

#48. Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the whole world, and an entire sprawling industry, that writing monsters and demons and end-of-the-world is not hack-work, it can challenge the best. Joss Whedon raised the bar for every writer - not just genre/niche writers, but every single one of us.

Russell T. Davies

#49. But very little of it can do more
than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably
difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done
slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying
water in a sieve.

Mary Oliver

#50. The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.

Steven Pressfield

#51. People think I live here on Nantucket and just gaze at the ocean, getting my inspiration. Not so. I work in my basement and gaze out onto a single window that shows me a cement wall. This is a profession, and it's important to have professionalism about the writing.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#52. ... Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done - so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.

Ernest Hemingway,

#53. The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

Gerald Brenan

#54. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?

William Zinsser

#55. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

May Sarton

#56. My work is not my life. I started writing quite late, I didn't have that 'writing is everything, my art is all.' You have to be able to recognise the difference between the two.

Kate Atkinson

#57. Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

Lou Reed

#58. I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.

Sophie Calle

#59. The essential key for writing is to write regularly - like it or not - great ideas come often by writing; releasing the subconscious - waiting for inspiration and ideas will not work, but it does help to have a notebook with you all the time for sudden brainstorms or inspiration.

Robert Marc Friedman

#60. 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

#61. I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.

Jane Green

#62. It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things ...

Aimee Bender

#63. Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

Jerry Seinfeld

#64. We are doing the most important possible work in the world when we open the door and reveal our creative nature.
It is the work of the Universe itself.

Jacob Nordby

#65. It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

Doris Lessing

#66. A writer's work is the product of laziness.

Jorge Luis Borges

#67. Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

Ann Patchett

#68. You do bits and you fake anger and you write a bit and you have passion for it. Then you do it too many times and you have to work up the anger ... and I've never had to do that with Dr. Drew Pintsky. Dr. Drew is to medicine what David Blaine is to science.

Doug Stanhope

#69. The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.

Stephen Karam

#70. All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

Tom Stoppard

#71. A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

Stephen Jay Gould

#72. Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums ... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.

John Green

#73. In New York and L.A., there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something. You end up having a conversation with how the world receives your work, especially if you are writing narrative, not fiction. Sometimes it is an awkward conversation. It's like group therapy.

Sloane Crosley

#74. Co-creation is much more work than writing somewhere in a hidden corner and then publishing your content. However, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Alexander Osterwalder

#75. Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Sherman Alexie

#76. People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

Neil LaBute

#77. And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.

Soren Kierkegaard

#78. There is no such thing as lack of time, only unclear priorities and lack of motivation. It is better to abandon a project than to work on it half-heartedly for a protracted period of time.

Gudjon Bergmann

#79. There are instances where lines in my work are borrowed or stolen from sources, mainly from books, or they become my own versions. A lot of the writing is my own, too. But if someone were to take each drawing and trace it back to its source, most of them could be traced back to a book or a text.

Raymond Pettibon

#80. I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#81. To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.

Robertson Davies

#82. All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work.

Kate Zambreno

#83. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

Ernest Hemingway,

#84. Writing is easy, good writing is hard and excellent writing is hard work.

G.H. Guzik

#85. ...one of the main purposes of our assesment is to find evidence of the children using these ideas to make decisions about their writing work each day, catching them in the act [of writing].

Katie Wood Ray

#86. 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

#87. The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.

Thomas Lennon

#88. The main thing about writing is ... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

Ben Fountain

#89. Probably writers should forget what it was like to write the last novel, and the one before that, and the one before that, or we should all be plumbers. It must be good to be a plumber. Everyone is happy to see you, and no one reviews your work.

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

#90. People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

John Gardner

#91. 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

#92. I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work - one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#93. Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

Charles Kettering

#94. Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.

Lewis Black

#95. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Wislawa Szymborska

#96. The situation is not good with the record companies. It's just not working out, so I don't plan to record until it's straightened out. In the meantime I'm happy doing my movies and writing the music for the theme songs, whether I sing them or not.

Irene Cara

#97. I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

A.S. Byatt

#98. When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Oscar Hijuelos

#99. No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

Julia Cameron

#100. Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

Susan Orlean