I got a lot of empathy from my mother growing up, and I think it prevented me from ever really just writing people off.
You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.
If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.
I have considered the directing, actually. Not so much the writing. That is not really interesting, but the directing is really interesting to me.
For some artists the live performance is the chicken before the egg of writing or recording of repertoire. For other artists the writing or recording of repertoire is the chicken before the egg of live performance.
Every time you write anything, at least half your readers are going to disagree with you. A big part of sports writing is how you respond to that tension.
I met Quincy Jones in Seattle. We were kids together... liked each other when we met and have been close ever since. He wasn't writing when we met - in fact, I more or less started him off to write; voicing, harmony, and stuff like that.
Write every day. Make writing a part of your life, but also don't be afraid of learning from others because I think you can. I still try to think of myself as a beginner because that way I can keep on learning.
So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.
I like scripts. I spend a lot of time writing them.
I want to make sure that I make music that lasts. I've been experimenting. I've been writing.
I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.
Write a lot and don't think about publishing - just the writing.
I always joke that my kids' favorite holiday is Father's Day. They love the way I celebrate the occasion by writing each of them a thank-you letter and a generous check. It's my way of letting them know how much I appreciate the great pleasure and privilege of being their dad.
Before, I was writing a script to make a movie. At a certain point, I became A Writer in Film and Television. So I got TV deals to write stuff, film deals to write stuff. But it's dangerous. I got into the WGA, and I became kind of, you know, a slave! They just pay you to write a script, and it's hard to make the movies.
I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
If a stranger is writing something completely fictitious, or insulting me on a blog or a tabloid, I don't take it personally.
I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.
I would do a sort of violence to myself if I didn't express myself in the directly creative ways of writing, both words and music.
I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.
But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting.
Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.
Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.
For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.
As much as I thought the end of 'Friday Night Lights' was a really great ending, I was one of those people who wanted to make it into a movie. Even though it ultimately didn't work to do that movie, I did work with some of the other writers and by myself writing a script for that.
The first audience that you have when writing a book is you.
I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.
When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
I'll be writing records until I'm dead, whether people like it or not!
You know, I can't imagine 9 to 5 writing. That takes some stamina.
Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.
Writing chases after the senses, and conveys them in an altered form. When it is done well, the senses come alive in a new and captured form.
