My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.
There's something magical about the idea that you can write something down and someone else can read it. I'm still mildly agog about that.
I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.
I write music every day.
What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.
I'm quite glad I never learned to play the guitar, because I think I'd write songs that were more classically structured. As it is, I've had to create my own way of writing, which isn't typical. Everything's a big crescendo.
I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.
If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.
So many writers live their whole lives in rooms. You can be too civilised in the environment you have around you, too oriented towards speaking engagements and literary festivals and dinner parties. That has no interest for me these days. You get to a point where you don't care anymore. At that point, you can start to write.
Oh, I will always be honest with my music. The records are black boxes for me. Like if you want to know who I am, my views, my perspective, things I love, things I hate, my convictions, my anthems. I've never let people's opinions affect the way I write.
I write by myself and then deliver the song. Everybody knows, 'Leave Ester alone when she's in her zone.' Give me a studio and the tracks, and I'll call you when the doctor is done.
Betting all your funds on the belief that you know what consumers want and are willing to pay for is like jumping into a river to test its depth - you'll need a lot of luck to stay afloat. To have a truly successful product launch, the conversations with your customers must start long before you write your first line of code.
It's not like I wake up every morning and just can't wait to write. It is my job. It's much easier to not write. I'd rather read. This is my income. This is what supports my family. Having a child is a pretty big incentive to keep working.
Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
When you write songs, you're writing little bits here, little bits there.
The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher's password and all the other students' passwords. And the teacher gave me an A and told the class how smart I was.
Any abhorrent behavior is more interesting to me. I'm always amazed when somebody asks me, 'Why don't you write something about nice people?' Because nice people are boring, that's why.
Normally, I just sit in my quiet little room and do the small things that bring me pleasures. I read my books, I answer email, I write a little bit.
I took some of the hardest things about my life and wrote an empowering song with it. It has made me want to always write from that place.
Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.
You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.
I always write 'Magic Potion' on my perfume bottles so when I use them, it feels magical - I make spells in the morning when I put them on.
As a journalist, I have wanted very much to find a way to write about the music industry, and it's been frustrating to me that that's never worked out.
I don't set out to transmit a message. I don't write with a political point of view. There are no religious overtones. Looking back at my books, I can say, 'Oh, yes, it is there.' But it's not in my mind when I write.
I'm very visual when I write and get a lot of inspiration from scrolling through Tumblr or Pinterest. I have picture folders to most of the songs I've written. It would be cool to release it as a book one day!
There was a terrible fear for me when I started writing, which was that if you'd been denied unbelievably tumultuous experience, you didn't have permission to write.
You might want to write 'War and Peace,' but that might not be who you are. You might be better off with nursery rhymes.
It doesn't matter if these characters are supposed to be together forever: if their chemistry gets stale, you want somebody to die, you want to put somebody in a coma, you want to write them off the show - anything to save you.
More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing.
I read a blog about this young filmmaker in the Philippines who made a short film, and one of the characters in the film reads my novel and then starts discussing the novel with someone. The idea that my book can inspire another artist and be part of that other artist's work... that's the reason I write.
People often write after they finish their career, or they don't play anymore, or they are not anymore active. So I say, why do that? And let's do it differently.
When you see the way some people write women, especially in studio movies, it's like, 'Sorry! Sorry for being alive!' Women are so apologetic.
