“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write”

“On the project The Celts I was asked to … to write a song. And, at the time I was … arranging with Nicky, and writing the music and performing … so, no desire whatsoever to write lyrics!… But Roma was actually writing poetry at the time, and she was involved, with listening in the studio … being the audience in the studio … so she was involved with the project. So, it was very obvious that she would write the lyrics.”

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”

“An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.”

“In this world you either read or write, and writers write out of contempt for their colleagues, out of a desire to have something good to read once in a while.”

“The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.”

“Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.”

“The desire of a poet for his writings to be in print is as natural as a painter needs to exhibit his work in public.”

“One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.”

“I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.”