Siri Hustvedt Quotes

I'm one of the writers that would die if I didn't say what I needed to say. For me, it's a matter of survival to write.

I can't not write, if I don't then I get really depressed.

I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.

I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can't do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it.

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.

Art is like breathing for me. If I don't do it, I start to choke.

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.

If I went for too long without writing, I would start to feel like something inside me was dying.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

I love writing. I feel more connected to that than I do a lot of the other things.

I feel like if I couldn't write, I would explode.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.

Art was - and is - my biggest outlet. I'd probably die if I didn't do it.

I don't write for fame or money, I simply want to share my experiences.

I'm just here to do the best that I can do with the music that I make, and I'm not making it for any other reason than I feel like I have to. These ideas have to be created because they're in me, and if I leave them in my head, I'll go crazy.

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.

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.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

If you don't have to write songs, why write them? I've got enough where I don't really feel the urge to write anything additional.

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

Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write - it is life, for me.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.