“It’s quite easy to talk in grand terms about why you write,” he’s said, “but a lot of the joy is solving the problem.”
“The first thing I do when I wake up is write,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what nonsense it is. You break the resistance before you’re fully conscious.”
“I assumed if I had six hours a day to write, I’d be six times as productive,” he’s said. “It didn’t work out that way.”
“Writing may be creative and all those terms,” he says, “but really, I treat it like a job. A plumber doesn’t wait for inspiration to fix the pipes.”
"When I am writing, I get up and start working at 4am. I am a morning person, luckily, so this is pleasurable for me to do."
"Sit myself in my chair and threaten myself like a recalcitrant child: you will sit in this chair and you will not move until you get this scene written, missy."
"I still work in two hour blocks – and I have a huge hourglass, which was a present from Mary, on my desk to ensure that I work for the full 120 minutes of each session."
"It's not a matter of time. I set a realistic objective: how can I inch along to the next paragraph? Inching is what it is."
"I wrote eight novels like that, working at night and in the early morning, while holding down a daytime job."
"I am an agonizingly slow writer. I try to set a five-hundred-word limit a day when writing. I'll sit down around 9 a.m. (after loading up on lots of coffee)."
"I get a lot of work done in hotel rooms. The one solace for loneliness is work. I hand write and then I type. I don’t have a word processor. I write slowly."
"My favorite time to write is between 5 to 10 a.m., because that way you have the total silence before the world starts chasing you down."
