From age nine, my friends and I were on the streets, walking home, going to each other's houses, going to the store. I really wanted to write about that: the independence that's a little bit scary but also a really positive thing in a lot of ways.
Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?
I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.
I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.
I actually worked in the general market for many years writing steamy historical romance, and I had more freedom in the Christian market than I ever did in the general market to write about any issue that I needed to write about.
Comedy, at least the way I write comedy, is just drama with jokes.
A man who wants time to read and write must let the grass grow long.
I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. There are moments I feel like 99 percent of the people who write stuff are the sweetest people, and then one crazy guy or girl spoils the whole thing.
I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.'
The Professional Children's School, it's for professional kids, so if you wanted to ditch, you could just write, Audition on a note and leave. I didn't really like school all that much.
The question of likability is a bit of a puzzler for me. You know, I don't write people with likability in mind. It's more whether or not I find them compelling.
When somebody wants to write an article attacking a scoring system or the influence of wine writers, who's right in the cross hairs? It's not Steve Tanzer, it's not Marvin Shanken, it's me. These other people, it's not like they don't have some influence, and I'm more than happy to share it.
I spent a whole 12 years helping other people tell their stories as a publicist, so just to be able to go and write and get behind the camera, that's my thing.
I try and write honestly about what I see around me now.
I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.
I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.
An artist can go paint, and a writer can go write, but an actor needs to get hired, needs somebody to say, 'Here, come and do this,' That's the hard part.
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
It is easy to write unthinking music.
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.
I always find myself stopping to write down ideas of things I'd like to make from computer hardware items to things new moms need - inventions to share with others to make their lives more fun or interesting or easy.
I have been playing a lot of keyboards, especially in the last five or six years. I suppose it gives you more scope than the guitar, although it does tend to make you write a different way.
Most of my work is, I get an idea, and, with the help of Wikipedia, I can write. I don't have to leave my apartment.
Morocco is such a beautiful place. It's incredibly beautiful. And also it is captivating place because for a writer, you feel that you make impact. I mean, when I write something in the press, the day after in the fish market, people will be discussing it.
'Celebrate' is meant to be a guide to party planning and, as such, it has to cover the basics. If I were to write a cookery book, for instance, I would be compelled to say that, to make an omelette, you have to break at least one egg. Actually, that's not a bad idea. Or maybe I should write a sequel and call it 'Bottoms Up?'
I suppress the vast majority of what I write.
Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.
I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.
The best thing to do when you're writing is to write about something you know instead of pretending. I mean, you can do that too, obviously, but when you write from your heart, it works so much better.
If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.
I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't.
When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.
To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.
I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.
