I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.
The urge to destroy is a creative urge.
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.
I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
Every time I see a piano, I have this urge to play it.
I like when the song starts to take over and you feel like you have to dance more than write.
When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.
The itch of scribbling.
That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.
When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.
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.
My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.
I was about to walk on stage at the Kansas Speedway - I was playing a NASCAR race - and I said to Scooter Carusoe, who was standing side stage, 'I want to write a song called 'Wanna Be That Song.' Then I put my earphones back in and walked right out on stage.
The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.
I always wonder what drives us as Artists.
I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.
The relationship between art and a job is not quite linear, but I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the relationships between these different mediums as very fluid.
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.
I just write when fear overtakes me.
Never strive, O artist, to create what you are not irresistibly impelled to create!
The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.
I am often asked why I write, and I don't know really--I just want to.
I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.
Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.
