I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing.
'Firecracker' was such a fun song to write and to perform.
I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.
I can write with absolutely perfect penmanship with my feet. If I broke both my arms, I could still write a girl a love letter using just my toes.
You can write every song on an album in E and not hurt a thing.
When I started doing 'The City' in 1990, most papers ran it the width of the page, 10 inches or so. It was great! I had lots of room to draw and write. It was the golden age of weekly comix. Today, most run my strip half that size. I just try to make it legible. It's very frustrating.
I write because it feels good, and I don't have a deadline, and I don't have people telling me what they want me to write. Maybe if I did, I wouldn't be very good at it.
If I feel like I've completely drained every ounce of energy out of me for this song, and I can't go any further with it, then I stop, even if the song is unfinished. Most of the time, when it's finished, it's because I've used every ounce of me to write it.
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.
I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.
If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.
I prefer to write music for family films. I like people.
I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good emails.
I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.
They offered me millions and millions and millions of dollars to write books about Cary. That was between us. That was private. I'll always love him.
I think the mistake lots of people make when it comes to a psychopath is that they completely write off their actions as cruel, callous and completely calculated, but actually, the truth is that they have interests and reasons behind their actions.
I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.
By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.
One thing I like about trying to write is that I can possibly write myself a role. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of whatever roles are out there that people are willing to give to you.
I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.
I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.
Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.
Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.
The show is different every night, because I never write a setlist.
Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.
The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'
Making reading an enjoyable activity for children is a challenge. So I ensure that I write in a way that is fun for children to read.
Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.
I've always loved massive worlds, whether in fantasy or science fiction. I like the idea of making my own rules as well as utilizing everything that I love or inspires me. It's very freeing to know you can write a story that can be as big as your own imagination.
The hardest part is making the time to write. Not finding the time to write, mind you. Making.
I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.
Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
I do like to write about characters who aren't just starting out, who have had adventures before, who have had a past they aren't that happy looking back on.
What's really fun is to write under different names.
