I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.
When I write I'm never really thinking about themes or the universal.
Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.
Without a function, we cease to be. So, I will write till I die.
It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn't have the need to be on the stage; I didn't feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.
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.
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
You're an artist when you're writing, a businessperson the rest of the time.
As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.
I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing - that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around.
A writer will not keep quiet. He will express his opinion through writings.
To me, the most important thing is the script. I would never make a movie that I didn't write. I wouldn't know how to.
If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.
I write mostly for pleasure, and the reading should ideally be for pleasure, too.
I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.
I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.
If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.
When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.
