As a high-school drop-out, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't overly confident that I was going to be writing anything serious. I was happy enough with the idea that I could be a penny-a-word guy and survive.
One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.
There have been some brilliant and very successful standalone books that work in themselves and also seem to refresh a series. Anyone who writes a series lives in fear of it becoming stale, so you do whatever you can to keep it fresh - although it does feel a bit nerve-racking to write outside of your comfort zone.
Music video directors, who conceive, write and direct these works, enjoy no creative rights, receive no ongoing financial benefit from the sale of our work, and many times are not even credited.
Before I begin to write, I listen to music that inspires me. I listen to folk Punjabi music, sufi music.
I can't read, I don't know how to write, my whole life has been one big fight.
To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing.
I'm not the 'chosen one.' I'm just one of many who have been given gifts. I can write. I can bloviate on TV. So I'm trying to use the gifts in a positive way. And I believe that's all directed. And that's why I'm here on the planet.
I like to write about women, not so much about the way they relate to men, but about the way they relate to each other. And I don't think anyone's really doing it.
The way my body is viewed in the world is different than a male body. People are going to write about the performance, but they're probably also going to be writing about what I was wearing or my hair, which just doesn't happen to men.
Because I write very simply, but inside the simplicity, there's a lot of subtlety. That's what I'm proud of.
I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.
Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I'd bet I wouldn't lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.
When the Bible was first published, bathhouses were mandatory, no one could read, and only the people in the Church could write.
I wanted to write about Jews in Montana, so I went there by plane and bus, only to discover that there are no Jews in Montana. It didn't deter me.
I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.
When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I'm not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.
In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.
I've been asked too many times to write a book by the fans.
I pestered the hell out of everybody I ran into until I could play the guitar well enough to write and sing with it.
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.
I always naturally want to change things up if I possibly can. I never want to write a sequel to a book. I don't want to go back over things. I don't want to adapt my own books for the screen. That's something that's important to me, the keeping it fresh.
I would say I'd rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.
If I ever stopped being angry, I couldn't write anymore. How could I?
It's harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.
Still to this day, I don't know when I write something whether it's good or not.
Actually, I can write anywhere - airport lounges, in bed, on a rattling train going north.
By the end of the week, if I'm still alive, I get to write whatever I want about it all.
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out,and I'm just writing it down.
