With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write.
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.
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer.
I am a compulsive writer.
Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
Like everything, what compels one to put pen to paper is a great question.
I always write like the devil's behind me with a whip. I'm going to write because I like it. Then I'm going to write another.
Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.
I love writing, and I think I'm kind of a workaholic. I'm happiest when I'm working.
I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.
If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.
I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.
The point really is that a writer tends to write a book that he or she tends to write. It's as simple as that. Of course, it's important to make a living and all that, but the main impulse as far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure as other writers are concerned - is to tell a story that I feel impelled by.
No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.
Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.
I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.
I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader.
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.
My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.
The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.
