Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think that there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
1) Sheer egoism.
... The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition—in many cases, in deed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
2) Aesthetic enthusiasm.
...
3) Historical impulse.
Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4) Political purpose—using the word "political" in the widest possible sense.
... Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art
should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
[my question: what about the writer's spiritual yarning or religious experience? Should this be #5?]
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. 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 or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.
