Art & Creativity Quote by Marguerite Young

Writing, for Marguerite Young, isn’t a pastime; it’s a symptom. “If you don’t have obsessions, don’t write” reads like a dare, but it’s also a diagnosis of what serious work costs: the inability to let something go. She isn’t romanticizing eccentricity so much as insisting on pressure. Obsession is the engine that keeps a mind circling the same emotional fact until it yields structure, voice, and image. Without that compulsive return, prose tends to settle into competent description or tasteful reflection - readable, maybe, but rarely necessary.

The lowercased “my” tightens the line into something intimate and slightly defiant, as if she’s shrugging off the polite workshop vocabulary of “motivation” and “arc.” In her universe, characters don’t merely want; they fixate. That fixation is craft: it gives scenes their gravity, makes dialogue double-edged, turns plot into consequence rather than itinerary. Obsession also functions as moral x-ray. What someone can’t stop wanting exposes their fears, their class wounds, their hunger for salvation or control.

Context matters: Young was famously meticulous, years-deep in research and revision, associated with the maximal, baroque sprawl of mid-century American ambition. Her own working life models the claim. The subtext is almost harshly anti-hobbyist: writing is for people haunted enough to return, day after day, to the same private problem and make it public art.