Janet Malcolm Quotes

So much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in the world and it has not been done before and only you can do it. Without these feelings, many writers would not be able to write anything at all.

Writing has never been a driving force within me.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn't have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

As a filmmaker what you can hope to do is doing what drives you.

Every creativity has a motive. Either one does it for money, for fame, or for passion. My energies go out for passion.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.

Look, Salvador Dali did not paint because he needed the money. No conversation about materialism and music makes sense. You make music and that's that, it doesn't matter why.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

Every work of art has its necessity; find out your very own. Ask yourself if you would do it if nobody would ever see it, if you would never be compensated for it, if nobody ever wanted it. If you come to a clear ‘yes’ in spite of it, then go ahead and don’t doubt it anymore.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

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.

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.

Art is always to a large extent about need, despair and hopelessness.

You need a purpose to express yourself, but that expression is its own purpose.

I still have an insane drive to create and express myself, and it'll never stop because I don't know how to stop it.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

I make movies for my needs. My goal has never, never, never been to make shocking movie.