Robertson Davies Quotes

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.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

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.

Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

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

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

Writing in the incurable itch that possesses many.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.