Writers on Writing

I was reminded recently of Joan Didion's essay, "Why I Write." Here's my favorite part:

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying   listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on 
                     the reader’s most private space.