Writing as a Calling Quotes

I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

He asked, "what makes a man a writer?" "well," I said, "it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers." "are you desperate?" "I don't know.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

While I think storytelling is a meaningful way to spend your life... it does feel a little bit secondary or off-point.

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.

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

[On writing:] What a difficult kind of work to choose! But of course one did not choose it. There was no choice.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

I can't point to a moment or incident that made me see that this business, this putting down words on paper, was what I would do for the rest of my lucid life. But apparently, that is my calling.

I have this memory of being 15 years old, sitting with a friend on the steps of a little bookstore on Bloor Street in Toronto and saying, 'I'll never take money for my writing!' I had such idealism about this idea of trading your soul for money.

I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.

I feel a duty to write because I can write songs.

Writing wasn't about making money. I wanted to find fulfillment in writing and telling stories, and that's what's driven me.