Paul Auster Quotes

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

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.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

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.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

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

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.

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.

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

He asked, "what makes a man a writer?" "well," I said, "it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers." "are you desperate?" "I don't know.

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 think something I've been drawn to about the people I work with is that they seem to be - like me - people who are a little insane, and have to make music. It's not a choice they're making for the sake of vanity - like it's cool to be in a band.

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

The inspiration to write? Perhaps it's not so much inspiration, as a NEED to write. I get itchy and guilty and dissatisfied when I haven't written for a while. Ideas come to me and need to be written down.

It's painful to consider anything but writing.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

When a real artist creates something, it has to be a necessity, the only way he can say something.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

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

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

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

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