And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.
It's weird because my parents don't really understand my business. I get fan mail all day long, but if a piece happens to get to their house, they're like, 'Oh, my God, you've got a fan! You have to write them back. You have to do it!'
I definitely could not write a character that was cruel or unconcerned with animal welfare. For me, not just as a writer but for the person I am, I love animals.
When I was little, I had to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I wrote, 'I want to be an actress-singer-dancer because you can be a rich fairy princess and tell someone off.'
When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.
That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.
Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.
The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.
My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.
The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.
I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print.
Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.
I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.
I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.
Don't write something that is your passion project because all it will do is get the passion stomped out of you.
For the longest time I was brought up listening to only two genres of music, pop and rock. So in the past few years I've been trying to expand my interests because I think that you can only write to the extent of your knowledge, and if your knowledge is limited you can't write past that.
I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece.
When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.
I didn't write the book to sell the book, but to tell my experiences.
We wanted to write the kind of songs that can really cross any language barriers, any borders, and resonate with fans around the world.
I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn't work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
Fortunately or unfortunately, NaNoWriMo requires you to write at a breakneck pace, so I got used to just pushing on through.
The England I write about doesn't strike me as the real one.
When you look into the eyes of your people out there that came to see you, that's when it's like, 'Yep, this is what it's all about.' This is why we don't sleep, and this is why we write songs and try to be the best. This moment right here onstage.
The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.
A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.
I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn't. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.
I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.
I'm really not a journalist, and I don't do a ton of newsy pieces. Occasionally I'll write about something that's going on recently, but I really don't do a ton of stuff that's tied to current events.
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'
If I didn't see its place in the Saga when I planned it, I probably wouldn't write it at all.
I'm the female Bob Woodward! If I were a liberal, I couldn't write another book. I'd be so busy collecting awards! I'd be posing for the cover of 'Vanity Fair!'
Never think you can't do something. I definitely never thought I could write a book, and even after I started writing it, I was like, 'Oh my God, how am I gonna write a book?' Just set your sights high and reach for the stars. Go live your dreams, and never think you can't.
