Gene Weingarten Quotes

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

Nobody writes a book to get rich. It's like speaking.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

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

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.

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

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.

It's people who write music because they are obsessed that I like; because they have something to say and no other way to say it.

I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you must write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

Some writers, of course, simply write, as they feel they are driven to do, by outer/inner inspirations. If, after the work is written and, hopefully, published, others respond -- that is the Champagne. But we, or some of us, don't write for the Champagne. We write because we write.

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.

I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.

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

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

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.

I don't write songs, play music and tour, really, for anyone else but myself. It's something that I have to do to stay alive.

I'm one of the writers that would die if I didn't say what I needed to say. For me, it's a matter of survival to write.

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.