When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.
I do a lot of performing, but don't get a chance to go to the studio and write good music.
I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.
I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.
The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.
I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.
I don't really mind what people say about my love life or anything like that, but the one thing is that, yes, I do sing and write all my own music. That is something that I hold really dear. And yeah, I made a fool of myself in front of the world, but it was also great to pick myself back up and go on tour.
Please write music like Wagner, only louder.
You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.
Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn't think I could read, much less write.
As you know, I am a novelist, and I really want to write novels. But I knew enough about the Dreyfus case to understand immediately why what happened to Dreyfus was not merely a cause celebre from the end of the 19th century, but an event that could be shown to teach us lessons of the greatest importance for our own time.
All my books were easy to write - doesn't it show?
When I write a book, I'm making it the best book I can.
I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.
Generally, when I wake up in the morning I set out a series of problems for myself and I write them down, and when I'm sleeping, my mind solves the problems. When I wake up in the morning, I have more clarity on the issue.
I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.
Being a songwriter does not rely on an audience or other band members or a camera. I can just sit in a room and write songs.
In all honesty, my favorite place to write is an anonymous, cheap hotel in a city or town where nobody knows me, the wireless service is spotty, and the adjoining gas station has coffee, beer and junk food.
I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.
As an actor, I come to set, and I have already broken the character down by writing a poem about the character. I try to write in his voice, the way he would write it.
While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story.
Whether I'll get the chance to write fiction, I don't know. I could do political conspiracy thrillers, couldn't I? With an investigative journalist as the heroine.
Decide where and when you want to write. I like space, and silence is an inspiration to me.
Sometimes I am glad I am not a philosopher - how would I ever complete a single chain of thought when someone is constantly asking me to do something? I don't think Plato would have been able to write his dialogues if he had a wife who kept bugging him to pass the pita bread.
I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays.
Whenever I write, I try and approach my stories from some kind of universal theme or idea or emotion.
You can learn Elvish, if you want. It's a language like Italian and English. You can learn to read it, you can learn to write it, and you can learn to speak it.
It's a powerful thing to be able to write a song. Even the least powerful feeling - like insecurity - that makes you feel weak when you experience it, when you write about it, you are powerful.
Our albums just tend to be collections of songs really, because we all write in the group, all four of us.
My own habit had always been to write about the things that ticked me off in a given day. If I kept a journal at all, I kept it to vent.
When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, 'Convert this to Android format.'
Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.
I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.
People expect me to be dark and gloomy, then write that I'm a jolly chap, and after all, that is what I am. I think it's a case of an absolute romantic naivety that there should be a parallel between the work and the artist.
