Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.
— Zane Grey
Work is my salvation. It changes my moods.
I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.
There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.
Men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.
I arise full of eagerness and energy, knowing well what achievement lies ahead of me.
It was a decent New Year's, but it took a million officers to make it so.
The Indian story has never been written. Maybe I am the man to do it.
What is writing but an expression of my own life?
This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.
I love my work but do not know how I write it.
I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me.
I hate birthdays.
Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.
What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.
Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply.
I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record.
I see so much more than I used to see. The effect has been to depress and sadden and hurt me terribly.
I am full of fire and passion. I am not ready yet for great concentration and passion.
Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.
The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.
I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.
No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.
I need this wild life, this freedom.
I will see this game of life out to its bitter end.
I am tired. My arm aches. My head boils. My feet are cold. But I am not aware of any weakness.
I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of time, toil, or torture.
These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.
Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.
