Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

I'm not that interested in writing for myself. That's not where my impetus as a writer comes from.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.

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.

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

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

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.

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

I knew that I had to find out more about van Gogh. Even though I was far too young, and felt I did not have sufficient technique to write a book about Vincent van Gogh, I knew I had to try. If I didn't I would never write anything else.

I'm attracted to good writing. When I read the page and I know what we're after and where we're headed, and I'm fortunate enough to respect that idea and am able to pitch myself toward that, that feels like the culmination of everything that I've spent my life trying to do, since I played that tree in that play in third grade.

Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.

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.

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

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

Real writers write because they love to write. They don't write for public acclaim.

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