Procrastination

Vacuum entire house. Reorganize all closets and drawers. Paint exterior of house. Ask neighbors if they would like their house painted. Re-vacuum house. Write lead.

SUSAN ORLEAN

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.

PAUL RUDNICK

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

JOHN BARTH

Writers can generate industrial quantities of procrastination before their first sonnet is rejected, or their first novel-outline-plus-sample-chapter is exorcised, burned and its ashes buried at sea. Are my pens facing north? Or magnetic north? What's that funny noise? Oh look, it's raining outside. My fingernails need cutting. I think my computer is going to break, better get it checked. Do I have toothache? Will I have toothache? The possibilities lend new meaning to the words eternity and purgatory.

A.L. KENNEDY

Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. ... It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes…. I didn’t always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth.

From my dick.

DAVID RAKOFF

If I owe you the song Tuesday, Monday night I really get to work on it.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

ALAIN de BOTTON

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN