No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always feel the same challenge - how do you shape this story into a book that people are going to love.
Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.
I've been a huge fan of all things paranormal my whole life. For me, it was always a question of when, not if, I was going to write a paranormal series. I dipped my toe in the genre by incorporating a mystical curse into the 'MacCarrick Brothers Trilogy.'
What I do is I write mainly about very personal and rather lonely feelings, and I explore them in a different way each time. You know, what I do is not terribly intellectual. I'm a pop singer for Christ's sake. As a person, I'm fairly uncomplicated.
I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired.
Writers don't write about people they know. They write what they know about people.
Miller didn't write Death of a Salesman. He released it. It was there inside him, waiting to be turned loose. That's the measure of its merit.
I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
Then I thought I was going to be a photographer. I tried a hand at darkroom technician. I played in a band. It took me quite some time to discover that I wanted to write.
I write with teenagers in mind.
At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it's pretty nifty: I don't mine coal; I get paid to write.
Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.
Most writers can write, most rock 'n rollers cannot.
In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.
I do make some conscious efforts to write female friendships, intergenerational female friendships. I make a conscious effort to include things that I see as important real parts of my life that are not reflected as much as I think they should be in popular culture. We very seldom have the opportunity to see women compete and remain friends.
Friends and family do not believe you write fiction. They truly believe that every word you write is either autobiographical or based on them. I once had a character say that she never wanted to be invited to another children's birthday party, and I never received another children's birthday party invitation ever again.
What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.
I'd dearly love to write a political book that changed the hearts and minds of men and women.
I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called 'The Right to Write.' In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it's as normal to write as it is to speak.
When I sit down to write a scene, I have a plan in mind, and I'm thrilled when a character disregards my goals and takes the story to a place I hadn't imagined.
When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.
My work looks like a comic book in form, but it's not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.
I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.
You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.
I was a subscriber to 'Sports Illustrated' like so many of us, and I was overwhelmed by a toxic mix of naivete and arrogance, and just thought to myself, 'I think I can write like this.'
I don't write lyrics. I hear the track and sing in gibberish over it, then I try and fit words into the phrasing and melody that I already have set. Everything is left to chance.
It's a big plethora of music floating around in my head all the time, and I'll sit there and write a song.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject.
I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.
I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn't write or read horror or fantasy, other than children's fantasy, until I was in my teens.
I was inspired to write this book by those who are sceptical of the power of freedom to change the world.
I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.
You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.
My darlings, if I can't write dark, epic music, I can't live!
