It's like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time. You need an executive head to handle all the vast paraphernalia of moviemaking. You need another, more sensitive head to get the delicate human emotional values you are trying to put on film.
I think the secret is really observation. Well, if you observe what's going on and try to figure out how people are thinking, I think you can always write something that people will understand.
Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.
I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.
Recovery is an ongoing project that is really discrete from everything else in my life. It allows me to be an agent, allows me to write, allows me to be married, allows me to be part of a family. The writing is not a support beam of recovery but a happy consequence of it.
I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'
I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
A publisher many years ago asked if I'd like to write a novel for £50. And I said, 'Absolutely.'
We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.
I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished.
Never regret what you don't write.
Most of physics is about energy, and physicists understand inefficiencies. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form.
I talk to Simon, I write to him. I never used to write a diary. But now I'm writing a diary to him. I think it's not just me, but lots of others, family and friends, can still feel him around.
The fact is that at different stages of your life, and under the influence of different inspirations, you write different things. The point is not necessarily to find your voice, which grinds out the same sort of thing again and again, but to find a vehicle for people who are far more important than the author: the characters.
I used to write things out beforehand. But sometimes it backfires.
I've always been interested in how fast-moving our identity is and that I've never been able to pin down who I truly am. That inspires me to write, because I feel like that cements me a bit, in that I find my identity in being an artist.
With rock, you can write about anything. There are rock songs I still don't know what they're singing about, but you want to get up and dance.
I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else.
I write about it in the book and, you know, explain that. But that was the technicality that actually got my sentence reduced - that Alan Dershowitz used to have my sentence - it came down eventually to eight years.
My music is so often like a lullaby I write to myself to make sense of things I can't tie together, or things I've lost, or things I'll never have.
I've always loved Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and I watched the Petty documentary 'Running Down A Dream'. I was directly influenced, it made me want to go write.
If you work in a home office, you can likely write off that space, as long as you use it only for work.
I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, 'Wait, I was there.' That is one of the great advantages of having wandered around the world and lived in so many places and met such fascinating people.
I became a Christian late, in my late 30s, so I had a lot of things that I was bringing into my Christian life that I regret. And I had a lot of questions about faith, so that's where I start when I write.
I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.
I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called 'Centuria,' which contains 100 stories, each of them about a page long. They're somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write.
One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
I've always loved to write. I've been writing a lot longer than I've been acting, and I hope to continue to do that and maybe do it a little bit more in terms of, like, writing movies that I could potentially act in.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
The O. Henry has become lingua franca among writers for saying, 'That guy can write a story.' It's prestigious, respected, coveted, dreamed about. It's very satisfying to be included in this group of writers. Here's a koan: Could O. Henry win an O. Henry?
They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
We don't choose the books we write; they choose us.
I speak Mandarin and can read and write a little. I took a few classes at Harvard to get better in my reading and writing skills.
If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.
