Everything I write is about me.
When I write, I make decent money doing it, but I don't wake up dreaming about writing.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It's a natural process.
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
I write in all sorts of places; it's a legacy of my time as a journalist, where I could turn out copy in a hotel corridor. But I have a little office that I rent in my local town, and that's my ideal place.
I write my lyrics into the computer and I hum my music into the dictaphone.
I sing songs that I have lived or I write them because I have lived them. I think the believability factor is key.
I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.'
I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.
I write, but I also act.
The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song. What do I write about? I never know.
I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.
I write books to find out about things.
I think a lot of people think that my parents' deaths is why I write such sad songs, but that's not true. Those songs may just be the woman I am.
It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.
I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.
With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.
I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.
When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.
I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
I never even held a guitar until I was 23 and living in California, but then loved it. I'm really not an accomplished instrumentalist. Maybe that has something to do with why I write and sing.
I never do any television without chocolate. That's my motto and I live by it. Quite often I write the scripts and I make sure there are chocolate scenes. Actually I'm a bit of a chocolate tart and will eat anything. It's amazing I'm so slim.
I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.
I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
I've never tried to define my states of mind when I write.
I'm not an angry person. When I write, the lawyer in me tries to make it as easy to read as possible.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length.
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This action makes me remember my strength which I forget at all times. I educate myself proportionately to my captured thought. I aim only to distinguish the contradiction between my mind and nothingness.
The characters I write about are very internal.
I think people appreciate a songwriter who shows different sides. The whole angst thing is cool, but if that's all you've got, it's just boring. Everything I write, whether it's happy or sad, has a sense of humor to it.
I think that's what makes my music different from other artists in my lane is that I write every word that's on my album, and every word comes from a real experience or a real feeling that I've either experienced or felt. And I'm very particular about that, and I take a lot of pride in it, so you know if I say something on a song, I mean it.
Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.
