Carl Jung Quotes

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

I had to do this album. I tried thinking, "I'm not going to do it." But then I'm sitting there getting all suicidal and depressed, and I just start writing. It's like this inner drive. If I could choose, I would probably be living in the countryside and be fine with that, but I'm not.

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

You don't do pictures because the audience is ready for them. You do them because there's something gnawing at you, something inside.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means 'absolutely nothing' from the logical point of view.. ..should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

I still have an insane drive to create and express myself, and it'll never stop because I don't know how to stop it.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

Some writers, of course, simply write, as they feel they are driven to do, by outer/inner inspirations. If, after the work is written and, hopefully, published, others respond -- that is the Champagne. But we, or some of us, don't write for the Champagne. We write because we write.

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.

I feel a passion for what we're trying to do.I mean, why does somebody who's old who's a writer keep writing? Because that's who they are.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

I like to write about things that are extreme in some form. I like to write about something I feel I have to write about.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot...I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.