Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
I want to get within myself and write. I really, really want to write.
One of the reasons that I think I do love to write is because I did have a difficult childhood and not so great teenage years. It always helped me escape from my problems.
I tell people: walk around for one month and write down three problems in your life every day. At first it's easy - you got stuck in traffic, you missed your alarm - but by the end of the month you're looking really hard to get your 90 problems. The most common things on your list are now billion-dollar businesses.
I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.
You have to insulate yourself - I'm talking about from everything, people can be talking to you and you won't hear 'em - that's how you write a song. And I haven't been able to do that over here 'cause I'm so busy and then, when I am off, I want to get away from music.
Do you think I'm wandering around all day thinking, 'I must write a song called 'Three Coins In The Fountain'?' Only an idiot would do that.
I never wanted to write 'Mamma Mia!' or 'The Book of Mormon' - they're not my thing, I don't care about them. What I do is very different.
If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there's just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.
I had a long, long time to make 'Rubberband,' and I originally thought that that record would last two years. Once I got over realizing that that's not gonna happen, and sort of got my perspective back, I realized, 'Man I'm really fortunate. I get to write music, make music for a living.'
The storyboard artists job is to plan out shot for shot the whole show, write all the dialog, and decide the mood, action, jokes, pacing, etc of every scene.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.
I started to write a lot of ballads that were sultry and had a Norah Jones-for-country kind of feel. I wanted to bring elements of old soul music and old country music.
The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
One of the things I wanted to do with 'The Turn' was write a production of songs that could be stripped down to one or two instruments if you chose to do it.
I have a credit card and a phone. I answer emails; I answer questions on chat in the middle of the day. Then, late at night, I write against other people who do just that.
'The One-Eyed Man' is a novel that was one I never intended to write.
If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.
If somebody takes the time, a: to read a book that I have written, and then to b: care about it enough to write me and ask questions, surely I owe them a response.
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
I have a very feminine voice when I write, a very womanly point of view. My last name feels strong and powerful. To me, it's almost a bit masculine. I like the dichotomy of the two. Two sides perfectly represented within my name.
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
When I went home at 20 to tell my parents, 'I don't want to be an engineer, I want to try and write books,' I was braced for, 'That's not gonna happen.' But I didn't get that response, and maybe it was because of my dad's experience of having an artistic dream and having to put it aside.
I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.
Strangely enough, I don't mention my sister too much in my columns because she nags me and says, 'Don't make me look foolish. Don't write nonsense about me. Don't make jokes about me.'
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.
I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.
I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.
I like to sing. I write music. Country songs. You have to if you're in Nashville. It's part of the lease. You sign a lease that says, I will write country songs and pay my rent on time.
I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.
One thing I want to say: I don't like victim stories and I don't write them.
'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.
I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness - and that can make me laugh.
