I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.
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.
I'm one of those people who has to write. If I don't write, I feel itchy and depressed and cranky. So everybody's glad when I write and stop complaining already.
I was entirely wrapped up in the idea of becoming an actor. I learned how to write on the job, basically out of necessity. I always thought it'd be fun to write something, but it never was an ambition of mine, per se. I just thought, "Well, maybe I'll do it one day just for the hell of it and see if it works."
Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.
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.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
If I went for too long without writing, I would start to feel like something inside me was dying.
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.
I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It's as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.
I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.
I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.
It's a very romantic sentiment, but to think that you would die if you didn't write, well, I would definitely choose to not write and live.
I don't think I anticipated supporting myself as a writer... I expected I would have to be a teacher or a journalist, that I wouldn't just write full time. It's such a part of my life, and in some ways, it's a very unromantic part of my life. It's almost, to me, like breathing. I don't think about whether I like it or not.
