When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.
I wouldn't not want to be a director and write as I wouldn't not to want to be a writer and direct movies.
Which is - you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right?
Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.
It's not how big your pencil is; it's how you write your name.
You know how it is with writing. You just write what you want to write. There's no way to predict what is good or bad. You just do what you think is funny, and either it works or you're finished. It's impossible to predict anything.
Be serious. You've got to do the job you were hired to do well, but there's always more you can do. When I was an assistant, I would say to myself, 'You may not be an executive, but act like one.' I would volunteer for any creative assignment - read scripts, do 'coverage,' write notes.
I want to direct, produce, and write, learning as I go.
I'm more interested in interpersonal relationships - between lovers families, siblings. That's why I write about how we treat each other.
I didn't go to Latin America thinking, 'I'm gonna write a book. This is what I'm gonna do.' I went there to work for UNICEF and to learn.
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
We all write, but the script is a blueprint. We can lose whole scenes when we're shooting.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
I binge write, basically. I do a lot of prep, research, setup. I'll have a pretty detailed outline. Sort of like a beat outline. And then I'll add little notes and dialogue ideas, and I'll just create a 20-page document.
I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.
I will always really work hard to write as much as I can, but I also love sitting back and waiting on those big Nashville songwriters to send me some great songs, too.
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
For this purpose I determined to keep an account of the voyage, and to write down punctually every thing we performed or saw from day to day, as will hereafter appear.
I have to write for everyone. What really fascinates me is how you make films or make stories that can genuinely be shared by different groups.
I want to play music when I want, write a song if I want or watch a baseball game if I want.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.
All experience helps when you write.
Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
The way I wanted to write it, is with a hero, or sort of a pure character who was the protagonist. And the antagonists were these demonic evil children, cause when you're a kid, seven or eight years old, and you're looking at the world around you - everything seems black or white, good or bad.
Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.
I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.
If I knew anything about what people wanted and was popular, I'd still be writing for 'Saturday Night Live'. I can only write what I want, and hopefully people will like it.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.
We write about ourselves because we know about ourselves.
I don't think of myself as Scottish or lesbian when I sit down and write. I am glad I have broken out of that limited audience.
We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.
You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you.
