Patti Smith Quotes

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

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.

The point really is that a writer tends to write a book that he or she tends to write. It's as simple as that. Of course, it's important to make a living and all that, but the main impulse as far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure as other writers are concerned - is to tell a story that I feel impelled by.

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

Ninety-five percent of all writers who write do not get published, but 100 percent of all writers write because they have a voice in their head. The vast majority of writers simply write because they have to.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I'm always fascinated by why a person becomes a writer.

I even dream about writing. I'm talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.

I always have a will to write. It's organic to me.

What excites me, what attracts me, what gets me up in the morning is telling the next story and getting it out in front of readers and hoping they'll love it too.

If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

I didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write.

Writing has been so much a part of my life that I'm really quite annoyed that I can't do as much as I used to.

Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

I wanted to write.

I can't envisage stopping writing.

What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.