Sean O'Casey - Writing gets harder the more you do it

Irish writer Sean O'Casey and his wife Eileen Reynolds

Sean O'Casey, playwright born in the tenement slums of Dublin, said:

"When I write a new play. When I sit down to try to write a new play, I’ve had the experience of many plays before. Yet that new play that I am going to try to write gives me the same agony, the same trouble, the, same effort, the same Herculean work as the very first play I ever wrote gave to me."

Christopher Hitchens said the same thing:

"I hate to agree with George Will about this… The truth is, yes there is nothing like not writing for making you unhappy and if you have the compulsion then the only problem that you’ll have is, you surrender to this compulsion more and more and, you’ll find [writing] gets harder the more you do it. That seems a shame. It should get easier, it should become more like a facility for example. It becomes more difficult and it becomes more difficult because you are reading more and more work by better and better people and you’ve lost the sheer nerve and the blind solipsism that allowed you to think you could try it when you were young before you had made any proper comparisons. So it gets much more nerve wracking and much more difficult in every way costly for you and no doubt for your readers."

Samuel Beckett on writing more generally said in 1954:

"It’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation, and before formulation."

Beckett also wrote:

"I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."