Why Do We Write?

Hundreds of writers have viewed me as their midwife, bringing their "babies" into the world and caring for them after birth. Others saw me as more of a stern gatekeeper, rejecting their passage. Publishers and editors are many things to many people. Mark Twain probably had it right: "They are conceited and troublesome, and don’t pay enough…I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words."

I often ask writers, "Why do you want to write this?" From their answers, I can gauge their passion, for without passion, it's unlikely they'll complete the task. Or complete it with any integrity. Without passion for the words they summon, they will view their book as a mere business card to get them more work, or as an ego-driven exercise resting in a need for acclaim. And if it's only money they hope to reap, then we have another discussion.

"Why do writers write?" is the third question in my book, 20 Questions Writers Often Ask...answered by other writers.

Here is a sneak preview...a collection of quotations, about 5000 of them, from writers across time and around the globe, in this case discussing our motivation as writers.  Enjoy!

 


Quotes

Writing makes the past disappear into the present. Writing makes the future appear in the present because writing is visioning and visioning is the foundation of manifestation—bringing something into the now.     
~Thomas Berry

Our inner landscapes are richer than our outer landscapes.
~Gary Zukov

I write because I don’t know what I think until I’ve read what I say.
~Flannery O’Connor

We must have a pure, honest and warm-hearted motivation, and on top of that, determination, optimism, hope and the ability not to be discouraged. The whole of humanity depends on this motivation.
~Dalai Lama

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such at thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
~George Orwell

Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest place of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Write to save yourself and someday you’ll write because you’ve been saved.
~Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
~E.B. White

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
~William Gass

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice—they all make fine fuel.
~Edna Ferber

To the degree to which we are motivated by feelings of enthusiasm and pleasure in what we do—or even by an optimal degree of anxiety—they propel us to accomplishment…Optimism is the great motivator.
~Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

One writes to make a home for oneself,on paper, in time and in other’s minds.
~Alfred Kazin

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
~Sandra Cisneros

Writing a best-seller with conscious intent to do so is, after all, a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money only to discover that the absence of love is more onerous than anticipated.
~Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art

I wrote from a sense of need. I needed something to do. You can’t sleep all day long.
~Snoopy, Charles Schultz

I write in order to shut my eyes.
~Franz Kafka

By writing our stories, we begin to understand what was formerly unclear.
~Louise DeSalvo, Writing as a Way of Healing

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so little.
~Anne Lamott

I wrote my books because of a compulsion to make some record of a fascinating era in veterinary practice.
~James Herriot, in Richard Joseph, Bestsellers: Top Writers Tell How

The main thing is—father and mother must eat. Write.
~Anton Chekhov

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.
~John Cheever, Speech

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and…no other task is of any consequence.
~Cyril Connolly

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.
~George Gordon (Lord) Byron

An artist is a creature driven by demons…He has a dream. It anguishes himself so much he must get rid of it.
~William Faulkner

You can’t be afraid to deal with your demons. You’ve got to go there to be able to write.
~Lucinda Williams

I don’t want to be a doctor, and live by men’s diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don’t see there’s anything left for me but to be an author.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.”
~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
~Joseph Brodsky

People say I’m compulsive and ambitious, but…I don’t think of myself as either. But the record of that constant series of big books, all of which have been widely received all around the world, must show some motive.
~James Michener, in Richard Joseph, Bestsellers: Top Writers Tell How

He [Michener]was forty when he wrote Tales of the South Pacific. His motivation had been boredom, though he thought that an honest record of what had actually happened would be of value, as he put it, to “a few people.”
~Richard Joseph, Bestsellers: Top Writers Tell How

I should write this so as to never forget it.
~Anaïs Nin

Every word written is a victory against death.
~Michel Butor

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
~Albert Camus

The thrill of seeing oneself in print…provides some sort of primal verification: you're in print; therefore you exist.
~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bug was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
~Anaïs Nin

Graphomania, the desire to be published…is merely an excessive desire to write.
~Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease

Everyone thinks writers know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that’s why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
~Margaret Atwood

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplished a lot more than his soul.
~Joseph Brodsky

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
~Leo Rosten

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from the desert, or like a pigeon let loose with a message in its claws, or like a bottle thrown into the sea. The point is: to be heard—even if by one single person.
~Francois Mauriac

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
~Edward Gibbon

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself; to understand himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings satisfaction, is a curious anticlimax.
~Alfred Kazin

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing?  Never!   
~Edna Ferber

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.
~Vita Sackville-West

We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.
~Cecil Day-Lewis

One who can handle a pen will never have to beg.
~Chinese proverb

I write to correct life’s unfairness.
~Verandah Porche

I write to unearth all those things that scare me, to reach those places in my soul that may seem remote and dark to other I write to preserve my sanity and to honor the sacrifices made by all those who came before me. The way I figure, it’s a privilege just to be given a voice to speak and to be heard. God and the universe will take care of the rest.
~Edwidge Danticat, Essence, May, 1996

Picture me sitting at breakfast in the morning. As I sip my coffee, my wife glances down at the floor and observes, “Bruce, we really need a new dining room rug. This one is wearing out.” Right there I have the inspiration to write another article.
~Bruce Barton

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread…The least energizing emotions to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
~Susan Sontag

All great things are done for their own sake.
~Robert Frost

A writer ought to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
~Mark Twain

I like to write when I feel spiteful: it’s like having a good sneeze.
~D.H. Lawrence, Letter

If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.
~Robert Benchley, Chips off the Old Benchley

I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.
~Wendy Cope

You ask me why I do not write something…I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
~Florence Nightingale, Florence Nightingale

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
~Robert Browning

I just write when fear overtakes me.
~Fran Liebowitz

In an odd way, writing is a testament to my lack of imagination. I can’t picture what another kind of life would look like.
~Hari Kunzru

I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time—except when I’m making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment—the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.
~May Sarton

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.
~Daniel J. Boorstin

Write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people.
~Sonia Sanchez

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.
~John Updike

I write to bring back what is gone, to relive what is lost, to make a mosaic out of fragments.
~Minfong Ho

I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn’t, I would die.
~Isaac Asimov

When I wrote Dr. Zhivago I had the feeling of an immense debt toward my contemporaries. It was an attempt to repay it.
~Boris Pasternak, Writers at Work

People want to write. The desire to express is relentless. People want others to know what they hold to be truthful. They need the sense of authority that goes with authorship.
~Donald H. Graves, Papers on Research About Learning

One of my motivating forces has been to recreate the world I know into a world I wish I could be in. Hence my optimism and happy endings. But I’ve never dreamed I could actually reshape the real world.
~Kristin Hunter

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.
~Harriet Braiker

No one does anything from a single motive.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises…It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

People write for two primary reasons: to be read and to make money.
~Isabelle Ziegler, Creative Writing

I write because I’m afraid to say some things out loud.
~Real Live Preacher, Real Live Preacher, weblog

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval and my effort is their self-expression.
~Dylan Thomas

Why do most writers write? Because it isn’t there.
~Thomas Berger

You do it for personal satisfaction, for the challenge, for the creative process. If you don’t get happiness from those three areas, and you don’t make any money, you’ve wasted a lot of time creating your book.
~Rollin Riggs, in Judy Mandell’s Book Editors Talk to Writers

Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence.
~Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

I write what I would like to read—what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says, “I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too,” I feel I have succeeded.
~Kathleen Norris

Why Write. The reason is perfectly simple: to live…because it is an endless beginning, a constantly new first time, like intercourse or pain. As long as one writes, ruin is averted, it doesn’t slip away; and that’s why I write: to bear the world as it steadily crumbles into nothingness.
~Günter Kunert, The Poet’s Work

My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into mediation, contemplating my novel.
~Edward Abbey

Anything that is written to please the author is worthless.
~Blaise Pascal

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
~Marianne Moore

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It’s like nothing else. It’s like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn’t end in marriage. It’s all courtship.
~Tennessee Williams

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.
~George Orwell

Writers, if they are worthy of that jealous designation, do not write for other writers. They write to give reality to experience.
~Archibald Macleish

I always write about my own experiences, whether I’ve had them or not.
~Ron Carlson

We are the species that clamors to be lied to.
~Joyce Carol Oates

In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.
~Michael Ondaatje

We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story, or the painting, or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children.
~Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
~Maya Angelou

I have no idea how people who don’t write endure their lives…Some of the things that happen to us in life seem to have no meaning, but when you write them down you find the meanings for them; or you translate life into worlds, you force a meaning.
~Maxine Hong Kingston

With a pencil and a paper, I could revise the world.
~Alison Lurie

Our final wish is to have scribbled on the wall our “Kilroy was here.”
~William Faulkner

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
~Anaïs Nin, Vol V, Diary

I write the way I write because I am the kind of person I am…I am a woman and I write from that experience. I am a black woman and I write from that experienced.
~Lucille Clifton

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
~James Baldwin

Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out if it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The tears had turned to ink.
~Dawna Markova

Nothing like bereavement to keep the heart porous. It’s hardness of the heart that can close down a writer.
~Bono

One writes not to be read, but to breathe—one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one’s mind, to dissipate one’s fears, to face one’s doubts, to look at one’s mistakes—in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one’s joy, but also to analyze and disperse one’s gloom.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Without and War Within

Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk and fear.
~Sue Grafton

One never knows, one just endures, keeps the faith, burrows through the muck and tries to appreciate every sunset. And, if one must, one writes.
~Frank Cotolo

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
~May Sarton

I write to bring back what is gone, to relive what is lost, to make a mosaic out of fragments.
~Minfong Ho

I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as the keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.
~William Faulkner

Two hundred years ago Johann Sebastian Bach was writing the rules of harmony for all time. Why did he do it? Pride of workmanship.
~W. Edwards Deming

…prestige. The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
~Samuel Johnson

A curious itch for scribbling takes possession of many and grows inveterate in their insane hearts.
~Juvenal

We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own.
~Julia Cameron, The Right to Write

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
~Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s The life of Johnson

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as your are dead and rotten
Either write things worth reading
Or do things worth the writing.
~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

I started to write out of my own insecurity and woundedness and inner struggles that became my source. I started to write where I was nervous, where I felt anxious, lonely. I started to express those things that most people don’t dare to express.
~Henri J. M. Nouwen, Publisher’s Weekly, Oct. 2, 1981

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!…On and on and on and on!
~James Joyce

I’m someone who writes to save her life…I can’t imagine what I would do if I didn’t write. I would be dead or I would be in jail…
~Jamaica Kincaid, [Donald McQuade, Robert Atwan, The Writer’s Presence]

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation.
~Graham Greene

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
~C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image

I write to understand.
~Eli Wiesel

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
~Meg Chittenden

Clearly, many writers write for reasons other than a desire to produce great literature for others’ benefit. They write for therapy. They write (queasily) to “express” themselves. They write to give organization to, or to escape from, their long, long days. They write for money, or because they are obsessive. They write as a shout for help, or as an act of family revenge. La, la, la. There are a lot of reasons to write a lot. Sometimes it works out OK.
~Richard Ford, Writers on Writing

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
~Tennessee Williams

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.
~J. P. Donleavy

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others’ minds.
~Alfred Kazin

I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer…Looking back through my work, I see it is invariably when I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books.
~George Orwell, “Why I Write”

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
~Sherwood Anderson

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.
~William Trevor

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
~Joan Didion

You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
~Nelson Algren

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
~Quentin Crisp

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar…What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.,
~Herman Melville

The sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself in his individual glass.
~Rémy de Gourmont

You do have a boss, although it’s not a person; it’s a deadline. You keep pretty regular hours—that is, if you want to get anything done. (I take Christmas, my birthday, Easter and the Fourth of July off and write the other 361 days each year.)
~Stephen King, Secret Windows

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash. (And not necessarily in that order.)
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Above all, love is the main generator of all good writing. Love, passion, compassion are all welded together.
~Carson McCullers

Any woman who writes is a survivor.
~Tillie Olsen

We write to expose the unexposed.
~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where lie those wild beasts, our fellow men.
~Virginia Woolf,  Street Haunting

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
~Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

This work is in the invisible realm. When you work in the territory of mind, you see nothing…you need great patience and self-trust to sense the invisible harvest in the territory of the mind. You need to train the inner eye for the invisible realms where thoughts can grow, and where feelings put down their roots.
~John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so, to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
~Elie Wiesel

It is necessary to write if the days are not to slip emptily by.
~Vita Sackville-West

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear…In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself on people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
~Joan Didion, “Why I Write.”

Unconsciously perhaps from the beginning, and more and more consciously during the last…years, my work has been motivated by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place.
~Wendell Berry, Home Economics

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
~Cynthia Ozick, interview, Paris Review

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy –and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
~Stephen King

I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.
~John Wesley

I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.
~Anne Frank

Some of us are like wheelbarrows, only useful when pushed and easily upset.
~Jack Herbert

Why do I write? The truth, the unvarnished truth, is that I haven’t a clue.
~Gloria Naylor, Writer’s Home Companion

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
~Jim Ryun

People often say that motivation doesn’t last long. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.
~Zig Ziglar

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
~Flannery O’Connor

And if I have to be a thieving, immoral crow in order to write a book, then by God, I’ll grow black feathers on my fanny and croak as loud as I can.
~Pasi Jääskeläinen

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was stabbed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire; then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer—and if so, why?
~Bennett Cerf