Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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

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.

I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

I make music and I can't stop. It's a compulsion and an obsession and a curse.

I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.

I have this disease-like need to try to create something new. When you're kind of being chased, and everything you do goes so well, you develop this sickness and a sense of need to constantly do something different.

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means 'absolutely nothing' from the logical point of view.. ..should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint.

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.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

I'm still compulsively interested in women. It's funny, I've always compulsively photographed women. I still do.

I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man's urge to open his heart

I write compulsively. I've got so many ideas, and I love to do it so much, I can't not do it. I write the way some people do drugs.

Writing in the incurable itch that possesses many.

Music is something I really have a need to do - I don't seem to be able to stop

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them.

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.

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

Those same forces that drive a genius to create the things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

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 don't know if I'm addicted to fame; fame is more of an unpleasant circumstance of an addiction to creativity.

There are so many different desires that make you execute an artwork.