
“At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why.”
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)
Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 219 (1960)
“At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why.”
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)
" My Father's Suitcase", Nobel Prize for Literature lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (December 7, 2006).
"The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)
Context: I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.
“Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.”
Take up home gardening!"
Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)
Variant: Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.
Responding to the end of his contract with General Hospital, as quoted in "Going Going... Gone" by Rosemary A. Rossi, for ABC Soaps in Depth.