{"id":1064,"date":"2005-10-16T16:01:00","date_gmt":"2005-10-16T21:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/martinepage.com\/wp\/2005\/10\/16\/why-do-you-write\/"},"modified":"2005-10-16T16:01:00","modified_gmt":"2005-10-16T21:01:00","slug":"why-do-you-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/16\/why-do-you-write\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do you write?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&laquo; Why I write? I never ask myself the question. I just do it. It must be the same for painters and composers. If you want me to get deep about it &#8211; to the extent that I can &#8211; I think humans create art because art is useless, and this uselessness reflects the uselessness of the human conscience. Our intelligence, our capacity for introspection, our extraordinary verbal ability &#8211; all are utterly unnecessary to our survival. Animals do without them. The absurdity of our ability needs an echo, a reflection, a companion. Ergo art.<\/p>\n<p>Why I spend four years of my life writing a novel, putting everything into it, mortgaging my future, I don&rsquo;t know. The sense of it being right and deeply pleasurable is so powerful that I don&rsquo;t feel the need to search further. &raquo;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yann_Martel\">Yann Martel<\/a> in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.ca\/readmag\/volume3issue1\/excerpts\/thenotebooks_about.htm\">The Notebooks, interviews and new fiction from contemporary writers<\/a>, edited by Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&laquo; Why I write? I never ask myself the question. I just do it. It must be the same for painters and composers. If you want me to get deep about it &#8211; to the extent that I can &#8211; I think humans create art because art is useless, and this uselessness reflects the uselessness&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/16\/why-do-you-write\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why do you write?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}