Why I Write Quotes
Most popular why I write quotes
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
When I started to write these plays, I wanted to attempt something of ambition and size even if that meant I might be accused of straying too close to ambition's ugly twin, pretentiousness.
Art, for the sake of art itself, is an idle sentence. Art, for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good, that is the creed I seek.
I make books for people to live in, as architects make houses. I lived in it by writing it. Now it's the reader's turn.
The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
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.
I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.
My answer to the question "Why do you write?" is that I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn't, I would die.
I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.
I have what I call "the theater of morning" inside my head. And all these voices talk and when they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they're gone.
First and foremost I write for myself. Writing has been for a long time my major tool for self-instruction and self-development.
I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands.
I write as an alcoholic drinks, compulsively and for its own sake.
Except when I am traveling or when extraordinary events are occurring, a day when I do not write tastes of ashes.
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Writing is the perfect medium for shy extroverts, getting out whatever's in there, and that suited me. If I could have acted, I probably wouldn't have written at all.
As I write I create myself again and again.
There is no agony like bearing an untold story within you.
I write—though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so—to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.
One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper.
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
One of the most fundamental of human fears is that our existence will go unnoticed. We'd all like to have it recorded somewhere. What better way to achieve this goal than by writing? Long after maggots have had their way with my corpse, my name will still be on the spines of books in the Library of Congress. I'm on the record.
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere.
I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.
I'm basically nuts. I sit by myself every day, most days, eight hours in this little room. It feels like either a torment or an adventure. The only way I can still the torment or appreciate the adventure is to write it down.
I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree.
I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.... I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and re-create myself when destroyed by living.
Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me you are indifferent to being heard. Everything about you screams to be heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has its end in its audience.
Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.
All my writing was born out of anger. In order to contain it, I had to write. If I had not written, I would have exploded.
Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy...of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.
