I don't take off time from teaching to write. I take time off from writing to teach.
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
People would write me hate letters. How dare I try to represent Hispanics when I was so white? I tried to make them see it was racism.
If you have a good selling idea, your secretary can write your ad for you.
If someone's going to talk about me, I'd want it to be positively. The way many write, you'd think only bad things were interesting. If we don't think positive, what's the use? It's a lot more fun, you know.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.
In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.
I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.
I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.
I tend to write songs critiquing myself. The best way for me to deal with stuff is to write a song about it... That's not to say all my songs are like that.
I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
I actually got to write with one of my musical heroes, a guy named Raine Maida from Our Lady Peace. I got to sit down and write some songs with him, and that was pretty heavy. I listened to Our Lady Peace growing up. It got me through the teenage angst.
I always just wanted to write and maybe direct. I'm really only interested in that. And yet the business that I'm in has forced me into being a salesman - that's the last thing that 17-year-old me would imagine I'd end up being. I'm uncomfortable trying to sell anything, but that's what you're doing every time you walk into a pitch.
I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.
I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.
I have to tell you, I'm a happy man. I've lived the life I wanted to live. I've written the books I wanted to write. No publisher has ever even suggested that I change so much as a phrase - commas and periods, yes - and I suspect that I have a lot of serious readers; in fact, I know.
Because I've been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn't have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting.
I write heavily under the influence of James Taylor.
For a long time, I'd wanted to write a book that I would be proud and happy and psychologically and morally comfortable about my parents' reading.
I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.
I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.
I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.
The very best thing you can do is to try to write a song that has some sort of impact.
Everything I write is based on something I've personally experienced, or things that my friends have experienced that I just find horribly entertaining.
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.
I just write mechanical things.
I write music people enjoy playing and listening to, and I have a group that loves playing the music.
If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.
You can't write about an iconic Hollywood star of the sixties without bumping up against Elizabeth Taylor.
I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.
It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.
I am human, when people write bad stuff about me it bothers me, but I know that will never end.
