When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.
I was desperately shy when I was wee. Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer, and I don't think the residue of that has ever gone away. I still feel the ultimate achievement would be to write a novel.
Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.
I've been in situations before where something was going on, and that's the only way you can kinda cope with it is to write about it.
My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call.
When I write an email where I outlined a whole scene, it just came out of my unconscious, it comes from a deeper place. The same thing happens when the actors go, take after take, and just get lost in it. When you're in a house, you don't think about being in the house; you're just there.
Every record we do, we do one song we didn't write.
I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
Every song you write you think is the last one you're going to manage. You put everything you've got into the song, and you've twisted it and pulled at it and dug in and found a way to complete it. To get another one is the trick.
I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law.
Writing is not work. In fact, there's nothing better. Writing is something that if the music business went completely away tomorrow - radio stations quit existing and music quit being popular and it was old hat - I would still write songs.
I can't write about people I don't feel some sort of connection to.
I am never going to write for the sake of writing.
I write in my study, where I also have my prayer altar. I believe that keeps me focused and gives me positive energy and reminds me that I'm merely the instrument of greater creative forces.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.
I always figured it was best if I write my songs, take them to my publisher and just lay back. There used to be so many things going on - getting to the artist, getting to the publishers - you know, politics. I just didn't want to get mixed up in all of that.
There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.
I don't think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the 'Comedy Central Roasts' for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.
I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.
Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved.
Well I actually do have a country house in Connecticut with a population of 3,000. Like, how small is that? I spend a lot of time there - I write up there. So I kind of have the best of both worlds and I love going up there.
I tend to write short, brief snippets - I lean toward the chamber music end as opposed to the symphony end of things.
All I want to do is write songs about funny characters I made up.
A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I don't know what they think.
Many who resort to crime ultimately can't read or write.
I wish there was some way to get the law changed. They can write anything about you after you're deceased and there's nothing you can do about it.
If you write a country song, and it's the best song you've ever written but throw it out because you're a metal band, you'd be an idiot.
A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
I love accents in general. I'm obsessed with dialects, and I had to write a whole movie about it called 'In a World...'
I write because it makes God happy that I write. I sing because it makes God happy that I sing. And if it makes God's people happy, then all the better. But if it fails to do so, it's probably my fault.
I don't write songs.
I think getting the rest of the guys in the band to write is important.
Maybe I'll write an episode of 'Black-ish' about a guy being fired in late-night.
I don't tell 'U.S. Weekly' which parties I'm going to. I write songs.
