A Quote by David McCullough

There's an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.

David McCullough

Quote Topics

Awful Just Keep Point Researching Start Stop Temptation Writing

Quote Author

David McCullough
American - Historian
Born: July 7, 1933

I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there; maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.

David Sedaris

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

Joan Baez

All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.

Linda Sue Park

I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it’s really a false start is when you start … it’s hard to put into words.

Elif Batuman

My writing process is chaos. I usually start with an overarching theme. Then I establish several story threads, but I don't outline. I just start writing and keep notes for what may come. It's an organic process that's usually pretty flexible.

Lisa Lutz

A true athlete is someone who doesn't just stop training when they stop competing. It's a way of life, and they keep in shape just to keep up that standard.

Fedor Emelianenko

As long as my heart's still in it, I'll keep going. If the passion's there, why stop?... There'll likely be a point of diminishing returns, a point where my strength will begin to wane. Until then, I'll just keep plodding onward, putting one foot in front of the other to the best of my ability. Smiling the entire time.

Dean Karnazes

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.

Bill Bryson

When you turn 60, the key is to not stop moving. Once you start to stop moving, you rust. You got to just keep going.

Christie Brinkley

All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

Etgar Keret

I'm just attracted to playing people who are ostensible unlikable. That's not to say that there's something in there that makes you care. It might be that you just find them so awful that you just can't stop watching, like a car crash.

Steve Coogan

I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.

Kathryn Stockett

The first time I go out to Nashville, ever (at this point I had only heard the rumors about what it's like) I had three writing sessions set up. The first two canceled on me. I was kind of pissed off at that point. So I just went back to my hotel room and started writing. And even though I've been to L.A. and experienced a lot of things, at the end of the day I just start to feel like I'm playing acoustically at the first bar I ever played at.

Curtis Grimes

Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.

Paolo Bacigalupi

There were times when depression, anxiety, whatever, would keep me from writing. I still get depressed and anxious, but I just don't let it stop me. I've just learned to move it to one side if I want to work.