Because to write, one must truly suffer.
If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.
There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to.
I don't think you need a record deal to write songs. You don't need any other reason than you want to do it. It's a far cry from why some people do music today. They make it to order, which is pretty horrible.
You have to write badly to write at all. If it's crappy, I will rewrite it later. But it will be mine. You can hear the resonance of an artist who goes into herself.
If I write in my name to the agents of England and France residing in Asia and inform them that Japan is ready to make a commercial treaty with their countries, the number of steamers will be reduced from fifty to two or three.
We live in capitalism, and capitalism is defined by the production line, and the production line is defined by specificity. If you see yourself as an artist, which I do, then you can't be limited by that. You can't let somebody tell you, 'Well, you can only draw this kind of picture or write that kind of book.'
To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.
So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.
When people come to write about my period of office, I would be very happy if they say that I made a contribution to finding the happy medium again for the Germans.
Sometimes a song indicates that it wants to be about a certain thing. And then if you write it, you find that it is about something that you've done.
Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.
Everything I write should have lasers. That's my #1 rule.
For me, it's very easy to write a horror movie that's just a succession of scary sequences, but it's hard to find horror movies that have a genuine theme to them that are really exploring some aspect of our psychology and our fears.
I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.
I see myself doing Harry Potter films as long as I'm enjoying it and as long as they are going to challenge me as an actor. I want to be an actor - it's my aspiration - so I want to do other films. I want to write something and I want to direct something!
A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.
See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.
If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills. Clearly I'm not meant to do anything else.
I'm not the most famous guy in the world; my work is spread out across different mediums, and I never write the same kind of story and rarely even do the same character from one year to the next.
I like to read and write and take pictures and bike.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.
I thought, If people are going to write about what I'm wearing, then I would wear young British designers who need the publicity.
Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.
I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
There's an old hymn called 'How Can I Keep from Singing?' That's what writing feels like to me. I have to write. It's intrinsic to who I am. So it was a natural choice for me to try to pursue writing as a career. Truthfully, though, I still daydream about how fun it would be to ride on the back of a garbage truck.
I do like to write nasty songs. It's a useful weapon to have, and it's cathartic as well, because I create art out of anger, something positive out of something negative.
I like to write and draw and paint, and my mom's an artist, so I think I get caught up in thinking, 'I'm afraid it's gonna be bad,' and it's hard for me to start sometimes.
If the right thing came along, I would absolutely direct something I did not write because I love the process so much, but we'll see. I'm taking it day by day.
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?
If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.
When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.
