I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn't ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most of my songs in college and really grew into an artist.
I think one of the coolest things about the job is the level of trust we have for each other. The actors fully trust that the writers will write amazing episodes, and the writers trust that the actors will follow their instincts with the characters.
A writer can write in an attic, or on top of a bus. Or with a sharp stick in some wet cement. To act, an actor has to have words. A stage. a camera turning.
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
I now have to find a reason to write, every single day.
Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.
I always want to write something better than the last book.
I always have been an entertainer, whether it's been joking or performing for people. And I always thought I had a talent, because I could rap and I could sing, and I did write. And all the other kids were going to college, but I just felt like I had to do this first, and if it didn't work, then I would go to college.
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.
Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.
With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write.
I've always been a writer. I hope to continue to write books until I can't anymore.
The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'
When people write about me, they usually start off with the headline 'World's Greatest Con Man.'
If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.
I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.
I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art.
As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.
Somebody said to me, 'You should keep a journal of this period in your life and really write down this stuff.' But that makes me a little uneasy.
One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn't the right one.
Basically I write songs, and I need for there to be a home for these songs.
I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room service.
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.
I often write either really early in the morning, or really late at night.
When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Genes are effectively one-dimensional. If you write down the sequence of A, C, G and T, that's kind of what you need to know about that gene. But proteins are three-dimensional. They have to be because we are three-dimensional, and we're made of those proteins. Otherwise we'd all sort of be linear, unimaginably weird creatures.
I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.
I sort of always like to write starting with when I learned how.
It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
