I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.
I find it easier to write in the winter in Melbourne. When the weather is good you want to go out for a walk, ride a bike, go to a cafe or something. When it's raining, when it's a miserable day, I just sit down at my desk and get some work done.
Write a lot and don't think about publishing - just the writing.
I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.
The perfect life would be to have an amazing part every year and to spend all my free time to just write.
I try not to write jokes that are mean. I try my best to write jokes that are pretty universal and jokes that don't attack anyone. I know I often fall short of that and end up taking unfair swipes at people, but I try not to.
I usually write in my underwear, with a space heater running full blast, and three dogs sleeping at me feet.
I think the greatest privilege you have as an artist is time to nurture what you want to make; that's super luxurious. For you to rush into something, that doesn't feel fun to me. I'm living life in order to be able to write about it.
Before, I was writing a script to make a movie. At a certain point, I became A Writer in Film and Television. So I got TV deals to write stuff, film deals to write stuff. But it's dangerous. I got into the WGA, and I became kind of, you know, a slave! They just pay you to write a script, and it's hard to make the movies.
I realized that even though I had this urge, this longing, to write about other people, in order for it to be emotionally gripping, I needed to be in there somehow.
I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.
I write entertainment. There are some books you read but don't inhale. There are books that will change your life.
Either I need an assignment with a strict deadline - like something for a movie or a TV show or whatever - or else I need to create a made-up deadline for myself for my own records. Otherwise, I don't write anything.
I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.
With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.
Entrepreneurs don't write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they're always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.
I want to write and direct and kind of do my own thing.
In real life, I am emotionally confused, which enables me to write songs. I'm a Pisces, and they say that Pisces are very sensitive. If men were just honest with themselves, they would see that they all have that side.
It's way easier to write for other people. Yourself isn't in it. When you write for yourself, you overthink, and you become paranoid. When you write for others, it isn't about you.
I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
I originally went to school to be a filmmaker. And so it's a big part of how I think and how I write. And it inspires me a lot.
I really feel like sometimes I'll write these songs, and I'll just think, 'You know that couldn't have come from me alone.' I believe that God inspires us. I believe that He gives us gifts and talents, and it's up to us to develop them and choose what we do with them.
Humanity is a failed experiment, but I think I'm God and I'd like to start over. I don't want to die, I just want everyone else to. I certainly would not be lonely. It would be exciting never having to listen to another person again but just my own self droning on and on. That's why I write a blog. And I read it, too.
I write about people who are usually damaged or neglected by society finding each other and forming relationships that are quite extraordinary and in some cases life-saving. I've had a few of those relationships, which I value highly.
It is true that I am one of the co-authors of 'Nudge,' and I am a behavioral economist, but it does not mean that everything we write about in that book is behavioral economics, nor does it mean that my co-author, the distinguished legal scholar Cass Sunstein, is a behavioral economist.
To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
Things happen in your life, and then you can write something else instead of the same three topics - like, how many times can we write about the clubs?
It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.
I don't like to write boring books.
I write and chop with my left hand and do everything else, including eating with a knife, with my right.
You wouldn't want to see the size of the check that I would write if it would for sure get the Dallas Cowboys a Super Bowl.
When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
I need an office and a place I can sit down to get away from television and just write.
I wrote a draft of 'Playboy' for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.
I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.
