I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

The line frames writing not as a hobby or profession but as a biological necessity: an act as involuntary and sustaining as breathing. It suggests that for the speaker, expression and intellectual production are bound up with identity and survival—without the outlet of writing, life would feel diminished or unlivable. Read this way, the quote also elevates creative work from external rewards (publication, money, acclaim) to an inner compulsion, implying that the deepest motive for art is self-preservation. Even when attributed to Asimov, its broader significance is as a succinct statement of the “writer’s imperative”: the drive to make meaning through language as a condition of being fully alive.