Why I Write - favorite quotes

A collection of quotes from my favorite book of collections of quotes from writers on why they write

“I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.” — Terry Tempest Williams 

“Writing is always giving some sort of order to the chaos of life. It organizes life and memory.” — Isabel Allende

“Writing memoirs has its advantages. I know I can never be blackmailed, because I keep no secrets.” — Isabel Allende

“If writing were illegal, I’d be in prison. I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion. When the sentences and the story are flowing, writing is better than any drug. It doesn’t just make you feel good about yourself. It makes you feel good about everything.” — David Baldacci

“But actually sitting there and conceiving story ideas and plotting — it’s the coolest profession in the world. I’m paid to daydream.” — David Baldacci

“Write everything as if it’s the first thing you ever wrote. The day you think you know how to do it is the day you’re done as a writer.” — David Baldacci

“When I’m not writing I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go on a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening.” — Jennifer Egan

“When I went to Sarajevo in ’93 and I was with these other freelance writers, and we were reporting on this incredible story, I went from being a waiter to being a war reporter in the course of three weeks. Seeing your name in print for the first time—nothing can compare to that.

By the time you’re at the level where you might be on the Times list, it’s just part of your business. There are beautiful, beautiful books that never make the list, and there’s complete garbage on the list. Every writer knows that. Everyone knows that whether you get on the list or how long you spend on the list, is not entirely a reflection of the quality of your work.

There are moments in the field, or at your desk, when you can’t believe what’s flowing through you and coming out on the page. It’s the hand of God, or whatever you want to call it: you’re writing way beyond yourself.

There are musicians who talk about a solo they’ve done and they have no idea where that came from. There are athletes who set world records and say, “I performed so far outside my abilities, I don’t know what that was.” It happens to writers, too. That’s the thing we’re all looking for. That’s the drug. Seeing your name on the Times list is such a pale, empty experience compared to that. You can’t even compare them.” — Sebastian Junger

“I do this sort of split thing when I’m writing. I’m very aware that I’m writing for readers, and I do everything I can to engage then, to make my writing accessible and compelling,

At the same time, I try to be completely disinterested in what I think people will like. I’m writing for myself. I want to learn about the world, and writing is the way I do it. You can’t know people’s tastes, anyway. No one could have predicted that Perfect Storm would be a hit. A fishing boat that sinks in a storm? The publishers don’t know. Readers don’t know. Nobody knows. 

In every book I’ve written, there were moments when I thought, I can’t put this in, I’ll lose half my readership. In Perfect Storm it was the physics of wave motion. Who wants to read about that? But I said to myself, The story demands it. Waves sank this boat; you gotta explain how waves work.

So I put the physics in, and I thought, If no one reads it, so be it. If the author thing doesn’t work out, I can always go back to tree work. It wouldn’t be the end of my life. I’m going to write the best book I can. That said, if I put in a topic I think readers will be resistant to, I work extra hard at my language to make them eat their spinach. I don’t like spinach, but if you add enough garlic I’ll eat it.” — Sebastian Junger

“I’ve tried to figure out what good writing is. I know it when I read it in other people’s work or my own. The closest I’ve come is that there’s a rhythm to the writing, in the sentence and the paragraph.

When the rhythm’s off, it’s hard to read the thing. It’s a lot like music in that sense; there’s an internal rhythm that does the work of reading for you. It. Almost reads itself. That’s one of the things that’s hard to reach to people. If you don’t hear music, you’re never going to hear it. That internal rhythm in a sentence or a paragraph, that’s the DNA of writing. That’s what good writing is.

I pay an awful lot of attention to language. Language is really important to me. It takes longer to write that way, but it’s worth it.” — Sebastian Junger

“You can’t be slopping about the images you use. If you settle for “the rain hammered down” (which is probably a sentence I’ve written somewhere or other), it’s dead writing. You have to push yourself to think profoundly and imaginatively about what something looks like, what it sounds like, what it feels like. You have to push yourself to find powerful, original ways of describing things. 

If you can do that, and if you have good rhythm in your sentences, people will read everything you write and beg for more.” — Sebastian Junger

“I write to dream; to connect with other human beings; to record; to clarify; to visit the dead. I have a kind of primitive need to leave a mark on the world. Also, I have a need for money.” — Mary Karr

“I require myself to do a certain number of hours or pages each day: either six hours or a page and a half. If I’ve been working all day and I haven’t advanced because I keep writing and deleting, then I get to quit after six hours. After that I get up and I go and meet somebody who won’t talk to me about the writing. Six hours or a page and a half, whichever comes first.” — Mary Karr

In one of his “four great motives for writing” he writes:

“Aesthetic enthusiasm. “To take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.”

Yes, this is a possible reason to write. I imagine I am trying to think about prose the way I think about music. I try to think of prose as a musical form, not just as a code we agree to use in order to advance a plot. Aesthetic enthusiasm is mainly what motivates me, because aesthetic enthusiasm has no particular narrative requirements.” — Rick Moody 

“Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it’s like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that’s still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.” — Walter Mosley

“Writing that is effective is like a concentrate, a bouillon cube. You’re not just choosing a random day and writing about that. You pick ordinary moments and magnify them—as if they’re freeze-dried, so the reader can add water.” — Meg Wolitzer

"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn." — Anne Frank
(this one’s not part of the book’s collection of quotes, but it showed up somewhere recently and is lovely!)