I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.
I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.
I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.
I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.
The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.
I write about all manner of things: a guy fighting aliens in the New York State Library, Antarctica, Inca civilization in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and people often ask me, where do I get these ideas from? They come from reading widely, watching a lot of documentaries, and increasingly ,as I was able to, travelling around the world.
My final historical romance came out December 2005. While I enjoyed writing medieval romances, I was also dying to write something with more edge.
I've had to write in a different way because I'm not in a bad place and I'm not heartbroken, so there's no one I want revenge on.
Always, as a child, I would go around the house, and if I found a word that I didn't know the meaning of, I would write it down and ask my parents to define it and try to memorise it.
I'm a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else.
I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.
I'd like to see myself married with a child and hopefully still involved in the entertainment business as an actor who is also able to write a bit and direct some projects.
I always said when I was younger, I wanted to write film music, and I think that's what my ultimate dream is.
I want to write a studio movie, but probably one that's for me to be in.
I don't have a journal; I write music.
I could never really imagine myself doing one thing, and I'm pretty sure that I'll end up doing four or five different things. I want to be a Renaissance woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I want to just do everything.
Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that.
There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.
For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.
The challenge remains a simple one: to write news that stays news.
When I was 11 years old, I was a member of 'Press Pack,' which was a thing that would come out in 'The Sunday Times' in England. You'd write articles and send them off and would get a badge saying 'Official Press.' I was really excited about my badge.
If you had asked me, in the days of me dreaming about what would happen in the future, who I would want to write my first original musical, it would hands-down have been Pasek and Paul.
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.
Yes, I can speak a bit and I can read and write in Russian. I learned it from my grandmother who raised me with all the Russian fairytales.
One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.
It's human nature that we come in our own flavours, and it doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story unless you're doing something extremely small - a locked room-style story.
The Internet is just a chance to do something. Nowhere else can you go, 'I have an idea, I can write this idea, and I can execute this idea.'
You can't write about a personal struggle if you're going to water it down to meet everyone's expectations about what's appropriate.
It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.
For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.
I'm really just trying... to write what feels true to me. I don't think about a lofty responsibility. I think I'd be paralyzed by that. Like any of my male colleagues, I'm writing the stories that interest me in a way that feels true to me.
We live in such a celebrity-driven culture, but all those people have to go buy toilet paper, and all those people have products they use and their favorite sweet treats. They all have to write to-do lists, and they're all reading books - well, hopefully most people are doing those things.
I don't want to be an editor! I don't want to direct; I'd be a horrible director. I don't want to write - I have a 'story by' credit on one film I did. And I don't want to edit at all.
There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.
People write me every day. It feels like this cycle that keeps giving, because as far along as I get in my happiness and success, hearing other people's stories is a constant reminder of where I came from, where people are, and how much help everybody still needs.
But I love to write music. What I would love to do is give some of the songs I write to someone like Taylor Swift because I feel like she could sing them.
