My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.
I think a lot of what the iPad app is going to be used for is just reading the best content on Quora. It really helps the whole system run because people who are writing answers can get this very wide distribution to a large audience of readers.
When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.
I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I'll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.
I was in a band at school, and almost from the day we started, I started writing songs, just because that seemed what you did.
It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time. But in the end you have a great sense of personal dissatisfaction.
You gotta love this thing. Whatever you choose to pursue - medicine, law, writing, you have to love it. You study it, you eat it, you drink it, you try it, you do it, you love it in every way.
I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors - it's how you combine them that sets you apart.
On a daily basis, you're working with Steve Carell; you're not working with Ricky Gervais. You try a line, and you can't be writing for David Brent. You have to be writing for Michael Scott because Steve is Michael Scott.
Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.
I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.
My truest passion is writing, so I continue to do that on my own while seeing what all the buzz is about being in front of the camera.
I'm always mystified by the day-to-day workings of entities like Twitter that provide framework but not content, but I suppose it could be compared to the U.S. Postal Service, which manages to keep a lot of people employed doing lots of stuff other than writing letters.
As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.
I find writing to be a great stress-buster.
There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.
I was writing fantasy as soon as I could hold a pen.
I pretty much always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing goofy stories when I was 7 or 8. That was what I call 'wishful-thinking writing.' I grew up in the city and always wanted a horse, but there was no way I was getting a horse. So I wrote all these stories about kids who had horses. It's still fun entering these other worlds.
Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.
Rapping was something I always wanted to do, so after school, my friends and I would catch the bus to my house and just sit there writing songs, every day.
I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.
I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.
Just writing a lot doesn't necessarily make you a better writer. You have to hear yourself as a writer, and the best way to do that is to read your writing out loud.
For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.
I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.
I'm a pretty easygoing person, and it bleeds into the music. Even if I'm writing the most personal song, it's not going to come out totally serious; there's always a little tongue in the cheek.
I really believe what people have said before, that God is love. For me, it's music. For you, it might be writing, or for somebody else, it might be soccer or whatever.
In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.
Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex.
John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
I'm always conscious of what I'm writing, conscious of what the actor may ask me. I have a defense for nearly every line in the song.
For my type of story and my kind of writing, I think 'Vanity Fair' is the right forum.
I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.
