Fay Weldon Quotes

It's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

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.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

I think I would die if I couldn't get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.

I always have to be writing.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

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

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write [create]? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.

You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

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.

Many have an irresistible itch for writing.

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

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.