I am ambidextrous. I write with my right hand but played basketball in high school with my left.
If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.
From a building right in front of my windows, I can observe the speed of the sunrises and sunsets. The voices of children playing, laughing, yelling, and crying on the playground crawl up to the eighth floor, where I write. Their voices sound so innocent from a distance.
At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
I want to write songs people can sing along to. I can think of nothing more exciting than travelling the world and playing to audiences and having them sing your words along with you.
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.
I just write songs whenever I feel like it, whenever they come to me.
There's so many other things to write about than unrequited love.
I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.
We can summarize electricity, magnetism and gravity into equations one inch long, and that's the power of field theory. And so I said to myself: I will create a field theory of strings. And when I did it one day, it was incredible, realizing that on a sheet of paper I can write down an equation which summarized almost all physical knowledge.
I was so naive in radio technique that I knew nothing about timing. I would write pages on Honus Wagner and then get only half through by the time the show ended. I eventually learned, but there was nobody there to school me.
I've got to write about my character every day. I've got to find out where he lives, what bus he catches to school, and stuff like that. You've got to know every little thing about him so when you do it, it feels natural.
I write music visually.
I don't necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself.
In my day, when I was a young kid, army duty was compulsory in South Africa or you go to jail. I had the choice, so I spent a year in the entertainment unit, and outside of doing shows - and I used to write for, arrange for the big band - outside of doing that, I actually had a rock band in the army.
When I started out, nobody gave me scripts, so I had to write.
The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.
I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.
Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life.
Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.
Part of the appeal of fantasy for me is that I don't get bored. If I want to write quasi-Medieval, that's what I write. If I feel like doing contemporary for a while, then I'll do it.
I have been a print reporter my whole career. It's all I ever wanted to be. I specialize in political profiles. I have probably profiled hundreds of people over the years, people in very powerful positions. People don't always like what I write, but most people still talk to me.
When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I'm qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!
I like to sit and talk to someone, and if they want to write about it, OK. But when it's a chore, I have a choice. There's a choice for all of us, including me.
I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.
I wanted to write a very simple story about a boy, a wolf, a girl, a bear and a forest, so I thought I might set it in the past. I didn't realise that it went back to when I was 10: I used to love the Stone Age when I was a kid and wanted to live in it, and I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor, but I didn't remember it.
I'm a big fan of Yoko, one of those weird people who really love her music, and who argues with people all the time, because people do write her off.
For years, I've been interviewed, and they write what they thought I thought or what they thought I said. Sometimes it's accurate, and often it isn't.
I wanted to be a writer that had an impact. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.
Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.
The idea there were kids out there who didn't love to read and write just as much as I did struck me. So I went around schools and tried to make other kids love to read and write.
It is hard for anyone who discovers George Washington not to write about him, perhaps because he is so hard to discover and such a surprise when you do.
I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
The way I write is, I listen to things in my head, and then I copy them down. I memorize conversations and things like that; I seem to be able to do that pretty well. I suppose in that respect there's some improvisation, although I work over the stuff after I've got it down on paper.
I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'
