Writing And Pain Quotes & Sayings

Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone. — Bell Hooks

Writing a novel is like having a terrible illness. Every time you feel as if you are recovering, you have to start a new chapter, get over the setbacks endured by your heroine (you feel her pain) and set her up for more suffering. Conflict is the oil of fiction and in a romance, someone always needs a cuddle. — Chloe Thurlow

So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you? — Rainer Maria Rilke

No man ever puts down what he intended to say ... words ... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible. — Henry Miller

He used to think things like, This organic soymilk will make me healthy and that'll make my brain work better and that'll improve my writing. Also things like, The less I eat the less money I spend on publicly owned companies the less pain and suffering will exist in the world. Now he thinks things like, It is impossible to be happy. Why would anyone think that? — Tao Lin

But we were different now. I wanted only his pain, and judging from the girl he'd come home with last night, Madoc was still the same. A user. — Penelope Douglas

I'm sorry if ... I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you're trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever. — Shannon Celebi

The writings of latter-day prophets clearly teach that the sorrows and sufferings endured by Adam and Eve upon their leaving the Garden of Eden were ordained by God and were a necessary part of their-and our-earthly experience. President Howard W. Hunter, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, taught: "We came to mortal life to encounter resistance. It was part of the plan for our eternal progress. Without temptation, sickness, pain, and sorrow, there could be no goodness, virtue, appreciation for well-being, or joy." — Daniel K Judd

Pennebaker began his studies in the 1980s when he asked students to write about traumatic, stressful or emotional events for twenty minutes over three consecutive days. His results found improvements in both physical and psychological health. People were happier and healthier when they wrote, including reduced visits to doctors, positive effects on blood pressure, improved liver and immune system functioning and less use of pain medication. Writing also had beneficial effects on emotional health and enhanced social relationships. — Patricia McAdoo

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.
None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all. — Mark Z. Danielewski

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened. — Criss Jami

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over ... — John Hersey

I lose it when I can't write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off. — Carla H. Krueger

A writer tears open their soul for you
We lay bare our fears and woes for you
We pour our heart onto the page for you
We unleash our demons for you
Letters like blood smear the page for you
The world's pain we absorb for you
A delicate path of sanity walked for you

Only for you to -

Crumple the page in disdain
You will not abdicate your reign
In the oblivion of life, you'll remain

As I continue to write for you — Theresa Jacobs

Writing is like having a lover. Sometimes it's wonderful and sometimes it's a pain in the neck. — Rick Springfield

I usually try to write through pain and end up digging myself into a deeper hole. — Kit Williamson

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.
[from her Newberry Award acceptance speech] — Lois Lowry

My writing isn't actually guided by issues. I know it seems that way, but I don't sit down and think, Oh, there's this issue I'm bothered about. I only write about things that directly impact my life. When I write, there's a pain that I have to reach, and a release I have to work toward for myself. So it's really a question of the particular emotional circumstance that I want to express, a character that appears, a moment in time, and then I write the play backwards. — Paula Vogel

This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience. — Steven G. Krantz

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth. — Bell Hooks

I'm blessed to be living this dream of writing and singing, but that's not the real dream I had. The real dream was to make enough money to take care of all the pain and suffering that my mother has been through. — Missy Elliott

Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living
something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm. — Henri Frederic Amiel

A writer's tools are desperation, humiliation, loneliness, love, affection, heartache, happiness, glee, defeat, victory, setbacks, and a desire for personal redemption. People with the experience to know of such things relate that in order to write one must suffer an alleyway of anguish, and experience an array of physical and emotional pain. More than anything else, emotional growth, and writing are each reflective of the immeasurable gain accomplished through studious reflection. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Who Am I?
I'm a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer's heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me. — Sharon M. Draper

The fact is that writing, like any creative undertaking, carries with it both pain and great joy. The pain is often inherent in the most fertile subject matter; the joy lies in transforming that subject matter and thus moving through it in a way that helps us grow while we create something of value to others. — Judith Barrington

I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain. — Sefi Atta

Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear. — PatriciaV. Davis

Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain. — Dean Koontz

The main thing that I've learned, artistically, is that if I'm in pain and feeling the budding of anger - if I absolutely feel like I need to write a song about it, I'll either need to transform that anger into something positive, or I'll just need to throw the song away. Because eventually, I'm going to want to transcend that pain and that anger. — Alex Ebert

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that. — Curtis Jackson

Come on," he said to Valentine one day. "Let's fly away and live forever."
"We can't," she said. "There are miracles even relativity can't pull off, Ender."
"We have to go. I'm almost happy here."
"So, stay."
"I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it."
So they boarded a starship and went from world to world. Wherever they stopped, he was always Andrew Wiggin, itinerant speaker for the dead, and she was always Valentine, historian errant, writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead. And always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for the world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time. — Orson Scott Card

Whether we like it or not, life has a lot of drama and pain. But God is writing a great story. Are we going to let Him? Are we going to trust Him? — Beth Moore

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world. — John Cheever

This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it. — Don DeLillo

Part of the impetus for my writing is the pain I've seen my friends experience both in their marriage and in their dreams. — Peter D. Kramer

Our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds - the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both - to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. So — Anne Lamott

A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a "teacher" - she didn't mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense - I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be. — Heidi Julavits

While there is no quick fix for instant, pain-free creativity, creative recovery (or discovery) is a teachable, trackable spiritual process. Each of us is complex and highly individual, yet there are common recognizable denominators to the creative recovery process. — Julia Cameron

Today, however, we know that writing, at least science writing, is partly a skill. And skills can be improved. The pain can be reduced. — Michael L. Rosenzweig

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling. — Dorothy Allison

I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds - the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both - to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. — Anne Lamott

The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own. — Lydia Davis

Frankly, I have always dreaded writing - there always seemed to be pain involved, unpleasant self-examination and a lot of fear. — Trent Reznor

Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur ... These factors
the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations
remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.
Eric Leed — Robin Jarvis

Life has two choices: create or destruct. These choices are the backbone for all, within oneself and outside oneself. Too many ways of thinking are described by too many people that have no idea. If you're attached to your ways then detach, so you can change. Use this detachment in your writing, relationships, and understanding of life. Our future as individuals, as nations, and as mankind can only go one way. It's our choice whether we want the painful path or the peaceful path. — Mark Donnelly

The lyrical author is only concerned with his production, enjoys the pleasure of producing, often perhaps only after pain and effort; but he has nothing to do with others, he does not write in order that: in order to enlighten men or in order to help them along the right road, in order to bring about something; in short he does not write in order that. — Soren Kierkegaard

When I'm happy, when I'm enjoying life, I'm home, I'm surfing, I'm spending time with my wife, my friends and I'm not thinking about the pain. And then the moment I encounter something that feels difficult, I feel like that's when, for me, I turn to writing and thinking and maybe a song comes from that. — Jon Foreman

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction. — Paul Theroux

I dont know why, but I feel some pain when she knew I was writing a lot of writing for her and when she suddenly wrote one, it's not for me. You can't go on with the situation like that, it could have kill you at the exact moment. — Ariel Seraphino

I think pain is the best feeling for song writing. You can write good happy songs, but I think the kind of bruiting, depressing ones are more effective. They are easier to write when I am impassioned and angry. It is a good way to channel that negative energy. — Adam Levine

When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff. — Arcangela Tarabotti

Becoming Richard Pryor is a compulsively readable book that sets a new gold standard for American biography. Scott Scaul's research is extraordinary; his writing is taut, elegant, and insightful; and he captures both the hilarity and pain that made Richard Pryor such a towering figure, — Debby Applegate

The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others. — Joyce Carol Oates

Year after year after year, people write books about managing innovation or about leadership, for example, without ever going through the pain of saying, "This kind of leadership will cause this result in these circumstances and a very different result in those circumstances." This is academic malpractice of the worst kind. — Clayton Christensen

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. — Michael Chabon

[W]e wouldn't want to read a book about a perfect character who never struggles with character flaws, a difficult past, or interpersonal conflict. Writers can powerfully connect with readers when they venture to these thin places of pain and brokenness because readers can see themselves in the pain and want to journey from pain and struggle toward redemption or some kind of resolution. — Ed Cyzewski

What I love in working on film is just working with actors. It's one thing to write scenes alone over a keyboard and to imagine the actions and reactions in your head, but it's a completely other thing to hear actors speaking your words, to see their bodies bringing the fullness of emotion, need, desire and pain to life right in front of you. It's amazing. — Dee Rees

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled. — Dean Koontz

Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list. — Andrea Dworkin

The writing is - I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing. — Toni Morrison

This is our skin and nobody has the right to crumple us like a paper only to find another skin to write on, and then another, ruining people like they're pages, like they are somehow replaceable. Because that will only leave our delicate and fragile selves into a tattered mess. — Heema Shirvaikar

Loving your subject, you will write about it with the spontaneity and enthusiasm that will transmit itself to your reader. Loving your reader, you will respect him and want to please him. You will not write down to him. You will take infinite pains with your work. You will write well. And if you write well, you will get published. — Lee Wyndham

A Gift for You
I send you ...
The gift of a letter from your wise self. This is the part of you that sees you with benevolent, loving eyes. You find this letter in a thick envelope with your name on it, and the word YES written boldly above your name.
My Dear,
I am writing this to remind you of your 'essence beauty.' This is the part of you that has nothing to do with age, occupation, weight, history, or pain. This is the soft, untouched, indelible you. You can love yourself in this moment, no matter what you have, or haven't done or been.
See past any masks, devices, or inventions that obscure your essence.
Remember your true purpose, WHICH is only Love.
If you cannot see or feel love, lie down now and cry; it will cleanse your vision and free your heart.
I love you; I am you. — SARK

If your business plan depends on suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain. — Hugh MacLeod

Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared. — Madeleine L'Engle

The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts. — Mrinalini Sarabhai

This green place in which I stood with James turned slowly around us like a music box. All my memories returning, and all his. I could see and feel each of his days and he mine. Childhood songs, books read, hearts broken, arguments forgiven.The sweetness of these imperfections far outshining the regrets. Our lives overlapped as naturally as two blades of grass brushing together.
My pain forgotten, my clothes dry and clean, I pulled James close to me. As he lifted my chin, I felt no sensation of falling as when I had been Light touching one who is Quick. It wasn't the mere heat of a stolen moment in borrowed flesh. We touched now soul to soul, both of us Light. And when we kissed, the garden rocked, floating upstream. — Laura Whitcomb

But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. — Joseph Conrad

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer - committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. — George Eliot

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse. — Quentin R. Bufogle

I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this usefull invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our Doctors very particularly about it, if I knew anyone of 'em that I thought had Virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of Revenue for the good of Mankind, but that Distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their Resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it. — Mary Wortley Montagu

This afternoon the pain occasioned by my loneliness came upon me so piercingly and intensely that I became aware that the strength which I gain through this writing thus spends itself, a strength which I certainly have not intended for this purpose. — Franz Kafka

I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering. — Chuck Palahniuk

Advice to a new writer: There are no rules in this profession. Do what is good for you. Read books and watch films that stimulate your writing. In your writing, go where the pain is; go where the pleasure is; go where the excitement is. Believe in your own original approach, voice, characters, story. Ignore critics. Have nerve. Be stubborn. — Anne Rice

Myths are what remain once the history of an event has been forgotten or lost to time. Myths are like the memory of one's first crush; the pain and longing one felt at that time is forgotten, but the warmth and sweetness of romance lives on, probably even magnified, larger in the imagination than it was in reality. — Shatrujeet Nath

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. — Andy Behrman

Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better. — Buffy Andrews

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without. — Robert Penn Warren

Iannis: [writing to Corelli] Antonio, I do not know if this letter will reach you, or even if you are alive. Perhaps someone else sent your record, and that is why we found no note. I would like to say that Pelagia is happy, but she is full of tears she will not let fall, and of a grief no doctor can mend. She blames herself for the pain we have suffered, and perhaps the same is true for you. You know I am not a religious man, but I believe this: if there is a wound, we must try to heal it. If there is someone whose pain we can cure, we must search till we find them. If the gods have chosen that we should survive, it will be for a reason. — Louis De Bernieres

Write about fear. Write about pain. Write about heartache and resentment. Nothing worth reading comes from writing what can be said out loud. — Alexandra Cruz

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I'm writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For me, a father was nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. I know fathers are not like dragons because fathers actually exist. I have seen them on television and sliding their arms around their wives in grocery stores, and I have seen them in the malls and in the coffee shops, but these were characters in other people's stories. The sad thing is, as a kid, I wondered why I couldn't have a dragon, but I never wondered why I didn't have a father. (page 20) — Donald Miller

Only with great care. For thousands, carols will be their only link with a church. At the same time, sentimentality is perhaps the single most dangerous feature of our Church and culture-and the sentimental air is never thicker than at Christmas. The Incarnation is messy, dirty, and resonates with the crucifixion. We need a new wave of carol writing that can gradually swill out the nonsense and catch the piercing, joy-through-pain refrains of the New Testament. — Jeremy Begbie

I write songs to handle emotional pain. I guess what they say is true: with every heartache comes a great song. I also pray and have great friends. — Matt Sorum

It seemed just as clear to me that I would never pick up a pen again, fill a page with writing. The profession seemed too onerous, a perpetual mirror of our unredeemed existence, which I was also so loath to accept and endure. Over and over again to meet the morning hour anew, the day, the ever-estranged world, to touch them and wring one word from your stricken heart - and know this: this will not last, this is the moment of parting, already forgotten. But, still exhausted and blinded by pain, you must set off again, and who will make it worth your while? Is it worth the effort? — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through. — John Steinbeck

And as their penile pain began to subside, the two men were able to form more complex thoughts, resulting in a collaborative work: the development of a worldview that might be described as penilosophy. — Zack Love

For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. — Jamaica Kincaid

I like writing, and I enjoy it. It's painful. You can't get around the pain of writing. I'm still trying to balance on what I think is my creative habit. It varies, but I do know that I need to continue. It helps me with my acting, and the writing helps me be invested in a different way. — Gbenga Akinnagbe

There would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing. — Markus Zusak

The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they. — Ashly Lorenzana

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Over the years, I had my heart broken so badly that if I didn't find a way to get all the pain out, I was going to lose my mind. I was crazy! Like, wanting to slash tires and smash car windows. Crazy! I was so hurt that I had to write. — Jill Scott

And speaking of this wonderful machine:
[840] I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. — Vladimir Nabokov

And on the days I couldn't breathe, I learned to paint air. — Jenim Dibie

Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar. — Dan Alatorre

At times I enjoy writing and at others times I just hate it because it's definitely having to go back and experience some pain and express what you really feel. — Axl Rose

have to be on the cross and bleeding in order to have soul. They want you half mad, dribbling down your shirt front. I've had enough of the cross, my tank is full of that. If I can stay off the cross, I still have plenty to run on. Too much. Let them get on the cross, I'll congratulate them. But pain doesn't create writing, a writer does. — Charles Bukowski

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle. — Eric Hoffer

Writing a novel- actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs- is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV's so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it's damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit. — Steve Hely

It's always fun to do something that you know ultimately is not about the money, and it's certainly not the fame because it's a pain in the ass, but it's really the person in the seat you think about when you sit in the rooms and write, and you do all the things you have to do. — Jim Carrey

It's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ... — John Geddes