The blessing of being able to write music and let music speak for itself is you let the melodies and let the lyrics and the groove talk to people instead of me talking to people.
I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.
Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.
For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.
I definitely don't write with any kind of 'message' or 'lesson,' probably because when I was a child, I used to run a mile from books like that.
'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.
Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!
I feel a burden if I don't write.
I write based on how I feel.
Knowing what I'll write about and what I won't has never really been a problem. I won't write about things that bore me.
Every actor I ever meet goes, 'Ultimately I plan on having my own company and write and direct,' but yes, I too would love to write and direct a movie. I want to do a play, too. I want to do it all.
I don't put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
I can't write what I don't believe in.
I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'
The ultimate test of a finished account executive is his ability to write a sound marketing plan.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.
I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!
I'm touched by the Beatles. I want some of the music I do to reflect that. Here I am. I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that. Here I am. I'm touched by Jon Hendricks. I want some of my music to reflect that. And when I write, you're going to hear it.
Don't write anything you can phone. Don't phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper. Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink.
Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.
I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.
When 'If God Was a Banker' became a success, it changed my entire perspective. I wanted to write more and wanted to be lot more successful as a writer.
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
Everything I know, I write about. My only research is what I did.
I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.
I've never wanted to live in a ghetto or write in a ghetto. I want to write about a world that reflects the one most people live in. Gay people are just one aspect of that.
I could not write without my dog, Rhoda, a Lab-chow mix.
Write in a disciplined manner, but write in a way that is natural to the individual's thought processes.
It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it's completely different.
My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
