My publishers are wonderful because they have let me write what I wanted to. They're wise enough to know that, with any author who's not simply writing formulas - who's trying to create something new - pressuring them to do something for market purposes almost always backfires. I can't imagine working under those circumstances, actually.
I can't write about my greatest mistakes because I've slept with most of them.
I write edgy, sexy teen romances, and that's what I'll continue to do.
I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I'm not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.
I wouldn't describe that 'position' as 'parasitic.' I'd describe that experience as 'edifying.' I don't merely write from a critical intellectual distance. I actually live around here.
When I present or speak, I write the slides myself. And regarding time, I would like to be able to publish more than I do.
A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.
When I write sad songs, I feel like I'm sewing up a scar in me, and the outcome always feels so much better than when I write happy ones.
I used to sit home with my computer and write. After the Newbery, I probably spend more than half my time on the road.
To write is a humiliation.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
I write adult fiction, but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers. I love that if they have to grow up and move past JK Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi!
Heck, I'm no Henry Mancini or Michel Legrand. I just play the guitar and write songs.
Either we need to redefine what probable cause means and say that police are not subject to it, or we arrest officers right away just as we would with any other person accused of committing a crime. Either we write new laws or enforce existing ones; we cannot have it both ways.
Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.
I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.
The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper.
My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.
Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.
I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.
I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
I like to write music. And I think exploring with lyrics and figuring out how to make complete songs is fun. I think I have a take on it. I don't know if it's great, but it's an interesting take. It's original.
I write of the wish that comes true - for some reason, a terrifying concept.
It's really intense to write and make a movie and produce it and have it come out in the world. It's a very vulnerable thing.
My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.
I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.
Still, to this day I go back and listen to music that inspires me to write now.
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Great music seems to come from a lot of angst, and that angst is from great musicians getting together with intense chemistry. When that chemistry isn't there, people tend not to write great music.
George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.
To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
Some amazing records have this power to leave you with inspiration; you're left with the urge to write something. And some records are totally overwhelming, because they are so good, they burn the bridges behind them.
I used to work for a non-profit organization where I worked as a mentor and a counselor to first-generation college student and they kept asking me 'What can I read to try to know what I'm about to be in for,' and while I did have some good suggestions, I figured... I don't know that that book is out there, and that's sort of why I had to write it.
I hate writing. There are a million other things I'd rather be doing. I write because I have to. Because if I feel so strongly about what is happening to animals, and I don't do anything to help them, who will?
I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.
