creative compulsion Quotes

I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.

If I get an idea for a series that I really like, I'm sure I won't be able to resist coming back and doing it.

You ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find entertainment? Is it worthwhile? Above all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a reason?... I write only because there is a voice within me. That will not be still.

I could never even entertain the notion that it's an option, to not be an artist.

When plays present themselves, I can't miss 'em. I got to make 'em.

I have a writing addiction.

I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.

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.

I crave ideas, and when an idea hits me, it grips me and it tortures me until I master it.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.

If I stop working and publishing, and TV, and film and all that, I would be dead within a couple of weeks. I don't really have that kind of off-switch.

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

Without question, I've either got to be a writer, or I fail.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will.

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.

Once you know how to make a movie, you can't not make a movie.

I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on... I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce.

I won't deny a song or a melody. I can't deny it.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type - as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer - an insipid one or a clumsy one - but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years - as producers did - who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.