The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.

I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.

Itch to read, scratch to understand.

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

Throughout my career I've lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I'd have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated—and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I'll ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I’m supposed to write—the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don’t quite know it. But I trust I’ll begin to know it soon.

Writing is not a strategy it’s an affliction

Writing is a constant exercise in longing.

I'm one of those people who has to write. If I don't write, I feel itchy and depressed and cranky. So everybody's glad when I write and stop complaining already.

The itch to be original is an affectation caused by a lack of talent.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.

Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.