Writer's Block Quotes

he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

Read, read read. Read everything.

You will never work through writer's block if you walk away from your typewriter. That will only make it easier to walk away the next time.

Suggestions? Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that's just me) as if you've never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you'll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.

If I've got Writer's Block it generally means that I don't have that much to say or something's not quite connecting. I have had Writer's Block a bunch of times and it's generally because I'm not able to write down what I'm feeling basically. Mostly, I just need to be alone really, or be with someone who can bring that out of me.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

Bucky Katt: A bad writer is just a good writer with writer's block.

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

If you know how to freestyle, you will never have writer's block.

If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.

I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!

I don't believe in writer's block or waiting for inspiration. If you're a writer, you sit down and write.

There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.

There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only not enough information. If you can't write, learn something.

[In The Dark Backward ] someone who has writer's block and kills people in A Cabin By The Lake. I guess he's a type of serial killer, but I don't know.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else

One reason I don't suffer Writer's Block is that I don't wait on the muse, I summon it at need.

I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.

I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.

When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears--I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.

I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.

I often tell people to stop being afraid of writing bad poetry, or bad anything. I think that a lot of times, when people claim that they have writer's block, or that they get stuck, it's just because they're scared of writing bad things.

When the bad stuff was really intense in my life, it was really what you would call writer's block. Your facility is just not as good because you feel so bad. I've heard of people right on the verge of suicide coming up with some of their best work. I wish I could think of an example, other than Van Gogh, perhaps!

Writer's block to me is where you stop because you're afraid to go forward because you're not sure of what really should be happening next and you think, my gosh, if I choose this... you've got a hundred millions of avenues you could possibly go down but it's all an assess of characters.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.

I would also argue that there is a good chance that an outline will help you stave off any onslaught of writer's block. Let me advise you right up front that I am not a big believer in writer's block. I think writer's block is God's way of telling you one of two things - that you failed to think your material through sufficiently before you started writing, or that you need a day or two off with your family and friends.

I do think that the idea of writer's block can be very self-defeating for most writers because it's taking a lot of things that are not only real problems, but that are manageable, solvable problems if you look at them in an individual fashion, and lumping them under the umbrella of something mysterious and vague, which makes it very, very difficult to address what's going on.

I never have [suffered writer’s block], although I’ve had books that didn’t work out. I had to stop writing them. I just abandoned them. It was depressing, but it wasn’t the end of the world. When it really isn’t working, and you’ve been bashing yourself against the wall, it’s kind of a relief. I mean, sometimes you bash yourself against the wall and you get through it. But sometimes the wall is just a wall. There’s nothing to be done but go somewhere else.