I don't write any of my material down. I like to improvise and be spontaneous.
Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.
Write what you love. Love will hold you through the hard times and hold the world during the good times.
I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I'd think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, 'No - it took you one year to write, and nine years to sit around eating Kit Kats.'
Anytime I write something that's trying to be too smart, it doesn't work.
I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound.
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.
'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
When I write a song, it's all about the riff - the riff first, then the words come later.
I must say that it's easy to write nice things about Chicago because it's that kind of town.
My goal is to write one book of fiction, and that's all I want to do. It takes so much time, and I don't really have enough time. But I admire writers so much.
Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would.
I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.
Well, I always wanted to write from the time I was very little, and my mother encouraged me. She wrote a journal from the time she was 15 up until about the age of 76.
The way jazz works is that we take a theme, and then we write using the same structure, same chord changes, and then we can do different tunes.
Digital-Original just shifts the R&D costs for publishing to the authors and affords us the chance to write the stories we want to write and the stories our patrons want to read.
I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.
If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.
Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.
All I want is the same opportunities as the filmmakers I grew up admiring. But you know, I've had lots of amazing opportunities to do the movies I wanted to do. If I could write my future, I'd want to keep making character-based films that can make use of my voice as a filmmaker.
You write about what you know.
I've been reading about the idea of cyclical lives - it matches up to the idea of string theory and a multiverse. So I wanted to write a record about that instead of another song about broken hearts and drinking.
I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.
If I wasn't plagued by needing to write things, that would perhaps be a blessing.
I think shrinks are interesting to write about because you get to see what the character chooses to reveal, and what behaviors or stances the character tries out on the shrink that might not be part of the character's make-up outside of that room. It's an emotional test-kitchen.
I was very against pink and purple when I was young, because they were girls' colors. But that was only because I didn't want people to write me off for what I can do. When I got into my 20s, I decided that was stupid.
I write about what I'm going through.
Write what you feel. Write because of that need for expression.
Now I've got a fairly good grasp of the 18th century on what was common and what people thought. But I don't write in order. I write bits and pieces and sort of glue them.
Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.
What Stieg Larsson was up to - it was the Swedish guilt over World War II. All of our neighbors had the most terrible experiences with the bad forces, but Sweden didn't. I think we use the thrillers in a different way. We never write a thriller like 'Who is the murderer?' The big question in most of our thrillers is... 'Why?'
Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.
I have yet to write that one song that defines my career.
There are definitely a lot of roles I didn't get based off of the way I look, but I'm not going to let that stop me. I'm going to write stories for myself or work with filmmakers who want to tell stories about real people.
