It's easy to write for God and about God, because what a thrill to remind the church that the Holy Spirit of God is in you. What a rush! What an amazing blessing!
Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
Sing your heart out and write the best song you possible can.
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it.
'The Warmth of the Sun' was a very beautiful song that Brian and I wrote in the time period associated with President Kennedy's assassination. We didn't write words about that, but it was around that time we recorded that song, and there's a lot of emotion involved there.
When I'm singing, it's a mixture of my innocence in the projects, my mom and dad. It's all the good and the bad, the laughs and the frowns that I went through and seen other people go through. Then you be trying to write it. Whatever's coming out, you try and make it all cool.
I didn't want to write a book as Stephen King's son, because all I did was get born, and that's not much of an accomplishment. If that was the reason my book was published, it wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on. I wanted to do my own thing.
I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it.
Funny thing, as you become famous, people write less nice things about you.
But we wanted to work in a way we never had, which was write everything together. We had to face each other in the same creative room, which gets tougher as you get older, because you don't want to be confrontational.
A lot of songs you write are just for exercise - just pencil sharpeners.
If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don't want to write, do something else. It's as simple as that.
But then you have to write a song, so at that point, I picked up the reins and started to write lyrics.
Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.
I can write two scripts concurrently, but I usually prefer to do one at a time. However, I also usually have 5 or 6 story ideas that are percolating in my head at any one time, so it can get a little crowded in there.
One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
So, my sweetheart back home writes to me and wants to know what this gal in Bombay's got that she hasn't got. So I just write back to her and says, Nothin', honey. Only she's got it here.
Readers really want to come back to an author; they do not want a one-book wonder. That is all very well, but to be career author, you have to be prepared to write one really good book and then write another really good book and keep feeding your readers. You build your audience over a long time.
When I was young, all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.
I just wanted to write the songs. I never wanted to sing them.
I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.
It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.
I find it somewhat difficult to write with other people, although it has happened occasionally.
Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.
The big things in the average person's life are the romances that they have - and then the destruction and loss of them. Parents, siblings, children, the death of parents, family tension... these are monumental things. They struck me as being interesting to write about. I didn't have a very exotic life, but all this stuff happened to me.
I put on a big show when I write something I think is funny.
I have the most eclectic audience - I've got gay, I've got straight, black, white, rich, poor, young, old, in 45 countries. And they don't all come because I'm the Sinatra kid, though that's a big part of it. My biggest successes have come from pop songs that I write myself.
I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.
I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.
Most of my writing takes place at a cramped desk in a cramped apartment, so whenever I get to write on a train or make notes on a road trip, it has an entirely different cadence. And I can remember specific writing sessions while on a train through beautiful countryside in a way I can remember almost nothing else.
I had always wanted to write a song called, The Vicious Circle. I always thought it was like, the kids are born there, they grow up there, they die there.
My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments.
I write because I can't imagine not writing.
I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understands best what I'm trying to do.
