I went to college, but I learned to write by reading - and writing.
Listen, in England people are already writing their memoirs at the age of 23.
I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.
It's a terrible poison, writing.
I grew up loving cartoons, comics, magic, and writing.
I want to direct films, because I am a painter and a sculptor and I've done a lot of writing.
I love James Baldwin's autobiographical writing.
Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.
Most authors writing books like 'He's Just Not That Into You' dream of doing what I was being asked to do. I didn't like it. I'm good at giving advice, but doing it on TV and radio felt wrong, and when people resisted my point of view, I was like, 'Why am I doing this? This was not the plan.' So I stopped. It didn't make me feel good.
A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.
TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that's not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I'm still mostly American, but it's a nice tension.
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
Women are more complicated communicators than men, who have a tendency to pronounce and bloviate, and that makes for better writing in talky work.
The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
Right now, writing for me is most rewarding because I'm old enough now to have something to say, which probably wasn't always the case.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
As an actor you get categorized by other people, but it's not like I arrange myself into comedy mode or serious mode. If it's good writing you just have to play it true - if it's funny, it's funny. But obviously you don't want it to be amusing if you're playing Hedda Gabler!
I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.
When we've finished the current tour I'm going to go back to Italy and see if I can do some more writing.
Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.
I'm a huge Emile Zola fan, and when Bill Gallagher said he was writing a new character for 'The Paradise' and had me in mind for the role, I knew I wanted to play Tom Weston before I'd even read a word of the script.
Being in a rock band is about touring. It's about writing songs and it's about making records but it's also about taking a wonderful smile onto that stage and making the people feel good about themselves.
For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.
I can act... I do a little writing as well. And I'm good at typing. I'm a creative typist, actually.
I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.
I've been writing songs all along, and since moving to Nashville in the late-'80s, I'd begun writing something like 15-20 songs a year, instead of the typical three or four in previous years.
I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.
In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.
When we finished the tour we had been writing together for a year. We moved forward from there and have just now finished our record. We're having a new record out in the Spring.
