I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid.
When you write as a woman, there's this feeling there's going to be a softness.
It's very nice to be able to write something you don't have to get four other people to agree with before it can become authoritative.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.
Everything you write as an artist is about your legacy and your catalog and how you would look in a museum.
I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn't do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.
I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.
I don't know what makes a guy want to write songs and sing, but if you've got a message, you want to get it across. When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song.
I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
I never write thinking, 'What would a woman do?' any more than I think, 'What would a man do?' It comes down to what would a solid detective do in these circumstances.
But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.
I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
I wanted to write.
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
I write best when I sort of collide myself with another man. So I think, I hope, that a combination of me and Stieg Larsson will create something good.
Face it, you have to be sort of an egomaniac to write something down and think that anyone is going to want to read it.
It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.
Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.
Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.
When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.
To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.
I like to write from scratch most of the time, but I like to have a backup plan just in case.
To do an extreme metal record is something that is well within my capacity as a musician to write stuff out of the box, write stuff that's probably more extreme than the band I'm in at the present time, and it's something that needs to come out of me one way or another.
When I write, I write the drum beat. Though sometimes I write on piano or guitar.
But, I don't think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can't create his own Interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that's written, he becomes mechanical; he has no freedom.
I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
I write pretty much anywhere - on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.
To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.
We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
