When something is bothering me, I write a song that tells my feelings.
When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.
I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.
My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions.
I worked at comedy clubs - if I can use the term 'work' - for several years. I middled at one point. I never made it; I was never a headliner. I never made enough time to write enough good material, in my opinion.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
I don't like my birthday. I don't like things that are directed towards me. It took me a long time to get over people asking me to write my name in the book.
Mike Leigh encourages you to choose a person that you know to base your character on. You write a whole list of people that you know and you go through that list in great depth with him. And then he chooses one of those people from your list.
It doesn't take me long to write songs.
When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader.
I am glad I worked on a newspaper because it made me know I had to write whether I felt like it or not.
If you're pitching to investors for the first time and expecting them to be so blown away by how thoroughly amazing your pitch is that they write a check on the spot - well, prepare to be disappointed.
I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'
The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.
I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.
I think I write funny songs that make people kind of, like, stop what they're doing and be like, 'What did you say?' And then it makes them laugh a little bit.
When I sat down to write I just felt like a geek writing about myself. And then it dawned on me, just because of the way I am, I can't stop talking, and part of the problem is that anything that gets said reminds me of something that happened to me one time, and invariably I cut people off and talk about myself.
While many of my musicals deal with big themes and ideas, I don't intentionally go looking to write shows like that. A story will interest me, and then somewhere along the way, I discover that hidden inside are these epic themes.
It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.
I don't write stories about despair. I write stories about hope.
Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.
I sometimes read about authors who say they require a perfectly silent room maintained at precisely 68 degrees, with trash bags taped over the windows and a white-noise machine in the corner to write, and I think, 'Who are these people, and do any of them have kids?'
I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.
I've always believed that you write to discover what you think. On most subjects, if I'm asked what do I think about them, I'd say I don't know, I'll have to write them down.
I often say that I want to write like Tupac rapped. I could listen to his album, and within a few minutes, I could go from thinking deeply to laughing to crying to partying.
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.
What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.
Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves - the areas set aside in law for African occupation - as early as 1959 and 1960.
I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
As far as I know, if you take your time, write a good script and make a good film, then give the audience time, they will accept it.
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
I'll be writing records until I'm dead, whether people like it or not! I can't not write; if I don't, then I get really depressed. I'll keep going, I promise!
