When you write a song, you don't ask if it's good or not, or if it's gonna sell. When you write a song, you ask whether you've reached deep inside your heart and whether it's honest.
I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.
I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.
I sort of write onstage. I'll throw an idea out there, like Home Depot, and just start talking about it.
I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
If I don't write down a thought - or an image or a line of poetry - the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen.
I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.
I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.
When it comes time to write the book itself I'll shut the lights out, picture the scene I'm about to write then close my eyes and go at it. Yes, I can touch type.
I have never learned to read or write music so I am not a virtuoso musician like the others you mentioned. I am completely unable to play like them because I never learned classical music, I just developed my own crazy style!
You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
I'm always writing, even when I'm not at my desk. I write on my hands. I used to write on my kids' hands, too, but they don't let me any more. When I'm driving I sometimes write all the way up my arms.
I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.
I got to write most of everything I said.
Write what you really care about. Write what you want to say because that is the experience that always rates as genuine on the page.
I get the music, I get the beats. And I go to the studios and write the lyrics.
I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.
When I got out of high school, I thought, 'I'll take a year or two off and play the clubs, get this out of my system, and then go to med school.' More than 40 years later, I figure it's finally time to write about this crazy journey that's taken me around the world and back.
You can't write masterpieces in your 80s and be happy too.
There's certain things as a songwriter that I don't really care to write about, and there are certain things I won't sing about anymore. There are just so many things that I probably thought was OK for me, or have been in the past, that I would never want my son to think was OK.
They may well say not only is this not true, but I will put in an injunction to prevent publication. No, stories don't go in unless I'm convinced by the people who write them that they're true. And if I'm wrong, then so be it.
To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.
I store away my experiences and don't feel really happy until I've found a way to write about them.
I wanted to write a book like a rapper would write it - I didn't want to hold back. Rappers catch a lot of slack; I'm not going to be cursing up a storm, but when I look at Nas... his first album is one of my favorites. I want to tell stories like that.
The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.
When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.
Whether you've done anything wrong or not people will write whatever they want, so it's just a matter of not reading it, not buying into it, and hopefully the people that do read it realise that it's just fictional stories for entertainment.
I lived to write, and wrote to live.
Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.
I think sometimes when I sit down to write a song, it doesn't come out naturally, but when you are writing an email to someone, especially if you are writing to a stranger, you write much more spontaneously, and it's freer.
There's no way I can compete with someone who can write rap or rock and roll. Nor do I wish to. But I've always kept up to date with music changes. I worked very hard not to type myself.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
I should write a musical. That is probably one of the final areas that I should pay attention to, because it does kind of involve everything. It's got theatre, it's got young, pretty people... And it's got money!
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
