I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

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

The only thing that can kill me is death, that's the only thing that can ever stop me, is death, and even then my music will live forever.

[Writing] is an addiction more powerful than alcohol, than nicotine, than crack. I could not conceive of not writing.

No, nothing can stop me from acting except death; it’s my passion.

But I did not explain to you the other insidious aspect of writing. There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary...because it hurts less to write than it does not to write.

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.

I would write, edit, rewrite and re-edit the text. However, I still felt that I was miles away from the ideal version of the story born and still alive in me. I ran towards it with all my might and when I thought I had finally captured it, it would slip away from me and disappear. It looked more like an everlasting vision of an oasis in the mind of the thirsty pilgrim wandering in the desert. Finally, I realised I would never be able to record it in a way that makes myself completely happy with it. I had felt this earlier, but did not want to acknowledge the feeling, I did not want to feel defeated. Now I know - unless the writer suffers, goes through difficulties and finally, feels beaten, like me; if he writes the way he himself wants to write, if he wins over the story, he is dead and finished, as a writer... So, in a nutshell, the writer faces the possibility to die after finishing each of his/her works. However, it is better not to use that possibility until the end...

Writing is a delicious agony.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

The joy is to see that you are able to express your mind into writing that people could read even after your death. This will say a lot about the kind of person you are

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.