132 Quotes About Writers-block

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one's misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.

The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate.

What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.

Allowing yourself to make mistakes can ultimately go beyond a writer’s block.

And I rushed outside to memorize a tree ... for all time, if I can, I want to have it present, for at least one of all the stories that remain to be told, for a tree-lined lane down which I want to wander darkly someday, in one paragraph at least amid the maze of writing may the word 'tree' one day resound! Yet the dusk was falling, and my eyes, which were weary and which I didn't trust, could no longer make out the precise ... the true nature of a tree.

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.

The tug of self-destruction and the desire to defy mortality by creating an everlasting mark upon this world are uneasy acquaintances. The strident edginess behind a writer’s searchlight voice is a product of the natural tension that engenders when an apathetic writer believes death could arrive tonight. Stunned by fear of a hard deadline, the writer is jolted from their state of laziness and mental neglect that trolling inertia dampens their aptitude to love life.

One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, 'It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do-- you can either type or kill yourself.