Writer S Block Quotes

“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.”
― Charles Bukowski

“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.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.”
― Terry Pratchett

“People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.”
― Roman Payne, Crepuscule

“If you think of something, do it.

Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.”
― Lydia Davis

“Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“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.”
― Jacques Barzun

“If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Art is not in some far-off place.”
― Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

“Before Jesse could say another word, the bedroom door jerked open and Lucie’s father stood on the threshold, looking alarmed.
“Lucie?” he said. “Did you call out? I thought I heard you.”
Lucie tensed, but the expression in her father’s blue eyes didn’t change—mild worry mixed with curious puzzlement. He really couldn’t see Jesse.
Jesse looked at her and, very irritatingly, shrugged as if to say, I told you so.
“No, Papa,” she said. “Everything is all right.”
He looked at the manuscript pages scattered all over the rug. “Spot of writer’s block, Lulu?”
Jesse raised an eyebrow. Lulu? he mouthed.
Lucie considered whether it was possible to die of humiliation. She did not dare look at Jesse.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold

“I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.”
― Francois Mauriac

“The other thing that I would say about writer's block is that it can be very, very subjective. By which I mean, you can have one of those days when you sit down and every word is crap. It is awful. You cannot understand how or why you are writing, what gave you the illusion or delusion that you would every have anything to say that anybody would ever want to listen to. You're not quite sure why you're wasting your time. And if there is one thing you're sure of, it's that everything that is being written that day is rubbish. I would also note that on those days (especially if deadlines and things are involved) is that I keep writing. The following day, when I actually come to look at what has been written, I will usually look at what I did the day before, and think, "That's not quite as bad as I remember. All I need to do is delete that line and move that sentence around and its fairly usable. It's not that bad." What is really sad and nightmarish (and I should add, completely unfair, in every way. And I mean it -- utterly, utterly, unfair!) is that two years later, or three years later, although you will remember very well, very clearly, that there was a point in this particular scene when you hit a horrible Writer's Block from Hell, and you will also remember there was point in this particular scene where you were writing and the words dripped like magic diamonds from your fingers -- as if the Gods were speaking through you and every sentence was a thing of beauty and magic and brilliance. You can remember just as clearly that there was a point in the story, in that same scene, when the characters had turned into pathetic cardboard cut-outs and nothing they said mattered at all. You remember this very, very clearly. The problem is you are now doing a reading and you cannot for the life of you remember which bits were the gifts of the Gods and dripped from your fingers like magical words and which bits were the nightmare things you just barely created and got down on paper somehow!! Which I consider most unfair. As a writer, you feel like one or the other should be better. I wouldn't mind which. I'm not somebody who's saying, "I really wish the stuff from the Gods was better." I wouldn't mind which way it went. I would just like one of them to be better. Rather than when it's a few years later, and you're reading the scene out loud and you don't know, and you cannot tell. It's obviously all written by the same person and it all gets the same kind of reaction from an audience. No one leaps up to say, "Oh look, that paragraph was clearly written on an 'off' day."


It is very unfair. I don't think anybody who isn't a writer would ever understand how quite unfair it is.”
― Neil Gaiman

“On No Work of Words

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.”
― Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems

“You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.”
― John Rogers

“Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.”
― Meagan Spooner

“I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. "Have you thought of a story?" I was asked every morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus

“I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.”
― Stephen King

“When the ink runs dry, you're most likely writing at the wrong angle.”
― Carolyn Shields

“She's thinking that what she's been doing all these years isn't what she wants to do anymore. Sometimes music flows to her and from her, but sometimes it doesn't. Lately that happens more and more, and she can't seem to find what she had and what made her special. But she can't tell her father because he'd be so disappointed in her, so disappointed to find out she's not extraordinary after all.”
― Leila Cobo, Tell Me Something True

“I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.”
― Jennifer Egan

“Tongue and hand tied. It cut me off, trapped and held me within my own silent dark word tomb.”
― Jazz Feylynn, Prismatic Prose: A Genre Bending Anthology

“This assignment could damn well project all the words across my face and the ink stain my hands a gory mess before I finished it.”
― Jazz Feylynn

“I knew all too well the damage of scarlet ink smeared across page-after-page offering neither encouragement nor any compliments at all.”
― Jazz Feylynn, Prismatic Prose: A Genre Bending Anthology

“His eyes never blinked or wavered from mine, encompassing me in a controlling field.”
― Jazz Feylynn, Prismatic Prose: A Genre Bending Anthology

“Determined to enshroud his enchantment over me.”
― Jazz Feylynn, Prismatic Prose: A Genre Bending Anthology

“I assumed this yoke would encase me as well as any another hobble, only this one bound the mind.”
― Jazz Feylynn, Prismatic Prose: A Genre Bending Anthology

“In mid-stroke of word and paper fusion”
― Jazz Feylynn

“Those annihilating strokes slashed across my penned heartfelt words...”
― Jazz Feylynn, Prismatic Prose: A Genre Bending Anthology

“Every bloody mark had assassinated my writing along the way.”
― Jazz Feylynn, Prismatic Prose: A Genre Bending Anthology