The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.
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.
Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.
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.
He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.
If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills.
I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.
I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk.
I really feel something's missing if I'm not writing.
I've always expressed myself best through writing. I've gotten out all of my deepest feelings that way for as long as I can remember.
I'm a family-based person, even though we didn't exactly have a very happy family. I was never in any doubt that this was a centre of writing.
Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.
Writing has always felt like a compulsion. Even at high school there'd be times when people would ask me if I wanted to go and hang out and I'd sit home and write instead.
I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working.
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 think I get certain pleasure from writing what I'm performing.
There are these moments in the military where you're present at these enormous intersections of history and humanity. I came out of the end of that, and I just wanted to write. If you do it well, you know it will last. It can't get blown away like everything else.
I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.
And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.
I just always thought, I love acting and I love writing. And when I haven't got any more good breath and good energy, then I'll write.
Once I was condemned to three months' absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.
There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
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.
