“I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write.”

“I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

“Like I say, the way I write songs is, you know, inspirational. I have to wait for it to happen. And when it happens I get lines, and I just write them down, you know. I'm not sort of a Tin Pan Alley sort of songwriter. I just sort of write down what I get - without censoring or questioning what it is and what it means, you know. Like later on I look at what it means, but not at the time.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

“I don't know what I think until I write it down.”

Joan Didion (1934) American writer

“When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.”

Jim Butcher (1971) American author

“When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

“I want to write — I want to write — I want to write and never never never will. I know it and I am so unhappy and it seems as though nothing else mattered. Whatever I'm doing, it's always there, an ultimate longing there saying, "Write this — write that — write —" and I can't. Lack ability, time, strength, and duration of vision. I wish someone would tell me brutally, "You can never write anything.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer