Michael Chabon Quotes

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

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

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

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

Writers do not write about a place because they belong there, but because they want to.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.

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.

[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.

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

I'm not that interested in writing for myself. That's not where my impetus as a writer comes from.

If you're not engaged in the writing and it doesn't grab you then you just don't want to do it.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.