Why do we write?

"I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy." --from "My Father's Suitcase," The 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech by Orhan Pamuk