If you can write any way and it's working out, just bow down in gratitude.
The thing I always default to is that I'll always be here to write songs.
To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more.
I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
I'm trying to write songs to appeal to everybody.
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.
When I see somebody being mistreated, my eyes tear up and I want to stop it. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to write about it, because if I insert myself into the equation it doesn't really do much good, but if I write about it I think it could do more good.
Every time I make a mistake with a company, I write it out and try to figure out why it happened.
Subject matter that is not bound to reality offers more opportunity to write a unique story and cinematically present it in very unique ways.
I want to write, direct, produce, but in steps. I want to take steps. I don't want to just jump in because I sold a lot of records and just feel like I can jump into the movie world. Naw, I want to learn the movie world like I learned the music world.
I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.
I sit in places like Costa Coffee in Banstead and write rubbish. I need a deadline. I think about the 44 tour dates and keep imagining standing in front of all these people. Then every day I write 15 jokes minimum.
That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.
What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.
The real middle class India that has always been looking for a voice that is its very own. I write about it because I belong to it.
Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.
When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.
It takes a Bobby White to make a tired 90-year-old composer write a song about love.
Why can I write 'South' with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?
I find it creatively satisfying to write material and say it out loud in a public place, whether or not anyone's listening.
Everyone is so estranged; no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.
But I don't write so much now, because they're too painful.
Most voters assume because these political 'pros' are on TV or write for national papers, they know politics. Sadly, most don't have a clue.
I write what I'm interested in.
I've found it easier to write, to coalesce my thoughts, since having children. It brings you back to what you experienced yourself as a child, and you empathize with what your parents went through.
If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make.
If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.
If a man wishes to truly not be written about, he would do well not to write letters to 18-year-old girls, inviting them into his life.
When people start to write articles about what might be wrong with the 'Today' show you know where you should point the finger, point it at me because I have been there the longest. And it's my responsibility.
In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.
With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.
I've always been into 'fast-paced, don't bore 'em, keep it moving along, stick with the story.' You know: tell a story the way I want to hear a story. I find it more rewarding to write for kids, but I also find it a little easier, because you can just let loose a little bit more in terms of fantasy and stuff.
I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
You know, the Tea Party is a - first of all, it is a significant movement, and I think the media and some pundits have tried to write it off as a bunch of cranks or something. But, in fact, it's really a very legitimate and fairly significant swath of voters out there.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
