People have said to me, You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument. But I've got 10 gold records.
There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you.
I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about - and I think there are some writers who do that - but that hasn't happened to me. I do think it's dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.
If I'm not at my study by 10:00, 10:30, forget it, I can't write a word.
I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading.
By the time I got to the hospital, I certainly realised that I had a problem because I couldn't write or print at that time, which lasted luckily only about four months. I'd gone numb here and on my tongue and the right foot a little bit.
I've written a lot of books in my time, and to write a book about Joe McCarthy and have some of the major media paying attention, I'm not used to that.
The more light hearted I write about that, the better the message gets through.
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.
I don't practice or write stuff down - everything I do onstage was just made up before I went on.
I want to act, I want to write, and I need to follow good directors.
I think I just have to be myself. No one can write the songs I do, and no one can sing the way I do - I believe that's important for every artist to remember.
A lot of people write books not at the end of their career. Why you gotta wait until then? When you're momentum's going, that's when people really want to get to know about you.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
If you write a book that's as powerful and successful as 'Bastard,' there's a strong desire to prove there's something else.
Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.
What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself-and thus make yourself indispensable.
There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
Sometimes when I write songs, I don't know what they're about, and it just suddenly comes to me.
If you're trying to write something that you don't understand and embrace at the very core of you, it's not going to turn out with quite the authenticity and passion it should have.
When I write short fiction or novellas, I like to leave a hint of the fantastic, of the unreal. If you write a completely fantastic novel with ghosts and everything, the effect is less powerful than if you portray an absolutely realistic situation and, in the middle of this, you put a layer of fantasy, of mystery.
Other than fishing and a little bird-hunting, all I do is write.
Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.
I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don't understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.
Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.
The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law.
I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.
I wrote music. I was in a hardcore band when I was 14, and I wasn't good enough to play anyone else's songs, so I had to write my own.
I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down.
Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Write what you like; there is no other rule.
It's not like what I do, how I write, changes depending on the nature of the project. I give each story my all, regardless of if there are a few thousand people reading it or a few hundred thousand.
