Journal Quote by Jacques Derrida

I think I became a writer because I didn't know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me.

— Patrick Modiano

Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a…

— Rene Char

I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate…

— Linton Kwesi Johnson

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by…

— Nicholson Baker

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read…

— Carl Sandburg

I may not have become a good writer, but I managed to make a living out of writing.

— Ruskin Bond

I was an angst-y journal writing kid.

— Justin Halpern

Reading 'Youth in Revolt' might have ruined my career because suddenly I wanted to abandon all the emotional truth of something and just go…

— Rob Thomas

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

— Jeffery Deaver

I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal,…

— William Saroyan

When I was young, my knowledge of the literary world was a distorted tabloid sketch of dazzling fame, suffering genius, and tragic glamour. It…

— Robin Beth Schaer

I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner…

— William Saroyan