When you're lucky enough to get paid a nice chunk of change to write a movie or a TV show, you have no right to complain, really. I guess it's more of an appeal to the powers that be that the less they interfere, the more likely, actually, they are to get something that works, I think.
Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.
When something irritates me, I don't go home and write; I just don't do that.
I don't want to write every week, it's too much trouble, and I shall only write when I want something. If you think I'm sick when I don't write, you can send for me to come and tell you.
Writing is one of the few activities where quantity will inevitably make quality. The more you write, the better you're going to get at it.
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.
When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.
I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.
There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.
If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn't about 'rights', it's about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.
Every time I learn a new thing to do on my computer, I have to write it down so that I can remember it.
'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.
When you write a song, a song has longevity.
I always see my songs in colors, and I'm often more inspired by movies and photographs than I am by other songs when I write my music. I'm also inspired by fashion, and I want my music to be a visual painting of what's in my mind.
Most things I go through I have to write about.
Every redneck's dream is to write a song and have it go on a fishing show.
I love London - its where I'm born and bred - but New York just has such an energy when you're walking around, and if you act or you write and you act like I do, its just such a good town for you because people here like people who can do more than one thing.
It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.
Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.
I write, I write, I always write.
If there's ever a woman who's smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don't write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them.
Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write.
The stuff I write with Joe Lo Truglio tends to lean towards horror-comedy and horror.
If you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write.
I pretty much only write by default, because I want to make certain projects so instead of trying to wait and find them, I create them, but I'm not really a writer.
What would anyone want to write about me for? I'm just an old lady.
When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.
Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it.
Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.
