Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it.

I'm not driven. I love writing. My imagination is always working. I write when I have time, and life allows me the time.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

I write about what haunts me, and I write the books I myself am dying to read. I love it. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.

I like to write and that's why I write. I don't think about how much the book will sell.

I've always wanted to write a book. And it turned out that it was more about finding a story that I felt I was necessary for, that no-one else could write.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

I enjoy writing.

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

I wanted to write.

I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.

Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

Writing is a lot of fun for me; that's not to say it's easy, but I really do enjoy it.

I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. And I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.

You cannot write a book unless it is totally inhabiting your imagination and you are totally engrossed with it. Which is a kind word for obsession.

And I love writing; I've been writing ever since I was seven.

I write what's given me to write.

I actually started writing publishable stuff the day I decided I'd actually like to write something I'd like to read, and stopped trying to think what does everyone actually want.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.