Franz Wright Quotes

I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

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

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure.

Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.

My purpose is to entertain and please myself. I feel that if I am entertained, then there will be enough other readers who will be entertained, too.

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.

I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

I like writing, but I write for self-improvement more than I do for money.

The work itself is what motivates me. I like my own stuff, you know? I like the way it looks. I do it to please myself first.

Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I don't believe in writing for goals, or else I'd write essays.

I write the books to amuse myself.

I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.

It doesn't cost me anything to write some fun stuff for folks, because I just really enjoy a challenge.

You have to put time into the art to do it, and you have to know that what you'll get out of it is not a financial or a fame thing. It'll just be the pleasure of being an artist. And I'm cool with that.

I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.