I pay attention to the actors and stuff, but not even that much. I don't pay attention to who's writing.
When you're writing on someone else's show, you don't have to think as hard about nailing the perfect tone because you're kind of just like, 'Here's 20 ideas I thought of, and they can just pick the closest.'
Well, as an artist, I think that Elvis's generosity to me he always talked very highly about me, he always spoke very highly about my work and singing and my writing.
Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.
You should constantly write because your writing is always evolving and progressing. It's really important to start writing young.
I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.
I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
Writing is a creative process, and you need to have the doors and windows of your mind open so that you have the possibility of change.
I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight.
When somebody asks me what a song or a line is about, I feel like I'm not done writing it yet.
All the nice things about Suzanne are me. All the things that aren't nice, that was just the writing.
It's the hardest thing in the world to dedicate to writing, but if you do that even once a week, after six months or a year you'll have something substantial.
I've always viewed writing as an outlet for being vulnerable and all that comes with that. You are able to let things all out.
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.
I have been writing songs since I was 9 years old, so writing has and always will be my first love and passion.
Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.
It's no coincidence that I began writing the day my daughter started school. I knew everything I knew before I began to write, but I was raising two children and didn't have the time to get to the typewriter.
When I had the idea for 'Shopaholic', it was as though a light switched on. I realised I actually wanted to write comedy. No apologies, no trying to be serious, just full-on entertainment. The minute I went with that and threw myself into it, it felt just like writing my first book again - it was really liberating.
Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
I don't exist without writing.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
The writing process is more... it becomes a case of more like a diary for me. I mean, I write stuff down all day whenever I'm experiencing something that I think would be important for me to look at later on. You know, whether it be for writing lyrics or just for a memory, like, 'Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I was feeling that way at that time'.
When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters.
Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.
The point of writing my name to you is that I see who you are, you see who I am... and that's what it's about.
There is no money in the world that would compensate me for writing a lousy book.
I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.
I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.
Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.
I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.
After the novel was published, I came to feel that I couldn't call myself Orthodox anymore. It's so patriarchal, anti-women, anti-gay. There was something about writing 'Disobedience'... it felt like I had put it all in the book. I had done my best by it, recorded what it meant for me. I felt I was done.
I took lessons since I was little; I used to pay for my own singing lessons and take myself. Just take the bus when I was a kid and go. But I'd been writing music for years, since the smallest age.
