You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
It's funny, I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.
Lyrics is commissioned work, it is my profession. But poetry is my statement to life.
I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
Definitely haven't been doing writing. I'm so intimated by it now because I sort of put it to bed after I graduated, and I got so focused on acting. But it is something that I hope get brave enough - even if I just go back it for myself - it is something that is very close to my heart and I do hope that it's not something that is gone forever from my life. I guess that's just a choice; no one's going to that do for me, so I need to be the one to do it.
I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.
I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
I have fun writing. I don't make it a chore. I don't have to struggle with it.
I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write. But at times I have told myself that I don't necessarily have to publish anything else.
I didn't actually get along with my dad when I was growing up, so by the time I was in my 20s, I didn't think I was going to be a writer.
I hardly ever think about audience. I just try to tell a story for me. I write the kind of story I would like to read.
I redo the body of my poem like someone who tries to cure her own wound.
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.
You hear a lot of writers talk like writing is therapy or some kind of magic art, but it's a business.
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.
