Why the heck would anyone ever want to be a writer?

So, I'm trying to plan my presentation for my blog folklore project, and I've been looking up some quotes on writing. I'm trying to talk about why so many people feel the urge to write. I'm pretty sure anyone who has even attempted to write will relate:


"Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind". -Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad." -Lord Byron

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted." -Jules Renard

"The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax." -Alfred Kazin

"Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get to the outside, with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport. Same with dancers, artists, and singers - all the same urges with differing transportation." Graycie Harmon

"You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer..." -Stephen Leigh

"Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up." -Jane Yolen

"The historian records, but the novelist creates." -E. M. Forster

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." -Ray Bradbury

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. " -E.L. Doctorow

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." -Sylvia Plath

"If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." -Toni Morrison

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." -Henry David Thoreau

"I do not like to write - I like to have written." -Gloria Steinem