I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not. I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.
The fact that I have been successful merely means that I can write and illustrate in my own way.
There are two ways to write a werewolf novel - you can examine the genre conventions, or you can say, 'What would it be like if I were a werewolf?'
Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!
Writing headlines is a specialty - there are outstanding writers who will tell you they couldn't write a headline to save their lives.
That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.
I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.
I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.
I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.
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.
I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny. And I discovered a lot of great writers that went on to do a lot of great shows like 'Seinfeld,' 'Friends,' you know, 'Three and a Half Men.'
It's disheartening to write goals from year to year, looking back only to see you are in the same place. You can make so many promises that you get sick of yourself, but what is it that God can't do?
In general, I write for ages 12 and up - although I've received emails from readers between the ages of seven and seventy. My books are science fiction.
I write about things that are important for us as Americans. I'm concerned about al-Qaeda sneaking across the border with the illegal immigrants that are using the coyotes to get across the border. And that's not a Democrat or Republican issue, that's a national security issue.
Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
Whenever you write music, you want it to touch people on a certain level. I mean, I've been reading tweets about 'Troublemaker' and people saying 'OMG, I can so relate to this - this is a guy that I fancy, or a girl that I fancy; it's exactly like this person.'
I write from my stomach.
I'd like to write about whatever is going on with me at that point of time or situations I'm - which I'm sure a lot of people can relate with. I mean, I'm a deep person. I'd like to dig deep into the psyche, but at the same time, you make things that are gonna lift everyone up.
William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.
Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.
When I write, I write for myself, and I have high expectations... so I'm just trying to meet those. I'm not going to distract myself with other people's expectations.
I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
When I write a story, I have no idea what I'm doing. All I know is that I want to share something with my readers. The whole idea of writing is this place where you lose control, where you're irresponsible - it's a very liberating place.
When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.
I get passionate about certain subjects, and then I'll write a whole play around it.
After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.
There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.
I write first for myself as a therapeutic process, to get stuff out and to deal with it.
I do feel like I'm in this lucky position where I can write something and people will read it, and I feel like I should say something that's probably worth saying... I feel like it's something worth saying, and one more person saying it is better.
I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose.
I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I'll go into my office or whatever. But that goes from format to format.
I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.
Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.
If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.
