There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.
I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.'
I have a friend who calls me the queen of the nightmares because I've always had really bad nightmares. I keep a notebook by the side of my bed, so I'll wake up in the night from a bad dream, and my heart's pounding, and I'm really scared, but I write it down, and sometimes I get ideas for books that way.
To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul.
That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.
I want to write for history, not for the moment.
Real people - the interesting ones, anyway - don't remain static, and neither do the ones I write about. Changes take place, and they react to them.
Even when you write it, someone's got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you're still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I'm really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.
I'm just trying to write things that resonate with people. And when we're all going through something together, I think you smile after that - I hope that people leave inspired after one of my shows.
At the end of 1795 and beginning of 1796, I was ordered to write to the Church ministers.
By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.
I always try to write about believable people.
I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.
I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.
It helps to write as the character that I am trying to be, and try to journal every day as them. Once I've already recorded thoughts as this person, it's easier to just flip back through and be like, 'Oh, yeah, this is what she's thinking; this is what she's feeling.'
When I was pregnant, I had the romantic idea that after the baby was born I would not only take up reading in earnest again, but also write a novel while my daughter slept in her Moses basket. Of course, I barely had time to keep up with my magazines until she started sleeping properly.
A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.
I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.
What are you going to do with astronauts who first reach the surface of Mars and then turn around and rocket back home-ward? What are they going to do, write their memoirs? Would they go again? Having them repeat the voyage, in my view, is dim-witted. Why don't they stay there on Mars?
I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
I have no special talent, you know. I never took a writing course before I began to write.
My advice is: if you've got to be miserable to write great music, then drive a truck.
I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I could write songs. I discouraged myself and thought it was so hard. But starting this process and learning just what it is to be a songwriter and performer taught me that you don't have to feel discouraged about anything.
I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.
We thought we'd write a good script for women, giving them the fun roles that generally men get.
I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.
The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody.
South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less-than-fully-human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.
