When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.
Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.
When I write an email where I outlined a whole scene, it just came out of my unconscious, it comes from a deeper place. The same thing happens when the actors go, take after take, and just get lost in it. When you're in a house, you don't think about being in the house; you're just there.
I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.
I write in my study, where I also have my prayer altar. I believe that keeps me focused and gives me positive energy and reminds me that I'm merely the instrument of greater creative forces.
I always figured it was best if I write my songs, take them to my publisher and just lay back. There used to be so many things going on - getting to the artist, getting to the publishers - you know, politics. I just didn't want to get mixed up in all of that.
I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.
Well I actually do have a country house in Connecticut with a population of 3,000. Like, how small is that? I spend a lot of time there - I write up there. So I kind of have the best of both worlds and I love going up there.
I write because it makes God happy that I write. I sing because it makes God happy that I sing. And if it makes God's people happy, then all the better. But if it fails to do so, it's probably my fault.
I don't tell 'U.S. Weekly' which parties I'm going to. I write songs.
While I am most at home in London, I cannot really label myself as either British or Trinidadian. I write in the English language and live in the U.K. I find it hard to say that I am an entirely British writer, especially when I supported Trinidad in the 2006 World Cup and also support the West Indies cricket team.
I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.
So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.
People review my comic books. People review every article I write - 'The Atlantic' even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of 'Between the World and Me' was from a feminist perspective. bell hooks pushed back, among others. Some of that has value. Some of it does not. I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff.
When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.
Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.
When I write music, I know a lot of artists like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran tend to write from personal experience. I write from personal experience, of course, but I don't limit myself to that.
I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.
Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.
I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.
I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.
I write heavily under the influence of James Taylor.
I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.
Everything I write is based on something I've personally experienced, or things that my friends have experienced that I just find horribly entertaining.
The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.
I write music people enjoy playing and listening to, and I have a group that loves playing the music.
A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.
And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.
I write music to both the situations and the lyrics in plays.
I have a high range. Sometimes I sound like Stevie Winwood. Some people say I sound like Peter Gabriel. Some of the songs I write are funky. Others are slow. Some are ponderous, and some are there to shock. I must say some are pretty damn good, too.
I write for three or four hours and then hopefully I'll have something. Then I draw for the rest of the afternoon... I literally block out Wednesday-Thursday-Friday - I more or less disappear.
I write about sex, not love. What do I know about love?
I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.
I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.
My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.
