Barbara Tuchman Quotes

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.

The only thing that makes me crazier than writing is not writing.

I love writing. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.

I can't avoid writing. It's a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.

Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

Once you start writing something obsessively, it's almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down.

I'm like a junkie for writing.

I am a compulsive writer.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

How can you stop writing?

I have a writing addiction.

Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.

I think I would die if I couldn't get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.

I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on... I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It's like a disease - my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

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.

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.

I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.

I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.

Yes, writing is not easy. But can any writer imagine NOT writing?

If you do everything in your power to avoid writing and still can't, then you must be a writer.