I don't want to be famous or recognizable. I don't want to be critiqued about the way that I look on the Internet... I've been writing pop songs for pop stars for a couple years and see what their lives are like, and that's just not something I want.
Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.
Writing has never been a driving force within me.
For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working.
I am writing to make sure that kids don't lose very important traits like curiosity that can drive social change because oftentimes I think parents emphasise more on doing well in school, which is important, but perhaps that sometimes comes at the cost of a child's natural curiosity.
I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.
If you are careful about the content and writing style, readers will not feel that you are in a hurry.
I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.
I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.
Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it.
Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word 'delicious' and its synonyms.
Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.
I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.
For me, writing a historical novel was really hard. I love history as a subject and majored in it in college. I think, in a way, my training made it worse for me because I knew how important it was to focus on document-based analysis, and I really didn't want to get stuff wrong.
When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.
I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.
I think more than anything, you should do what you love. If you love classical playwrights, seek out companies or places that are doing that. If you love modern playwrights, try to find groups who are writing new plays or working on new plays. If you love television, watch as much theater and film as you can.
I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.
I'm a really slow writer. What I need to start writing on any given day, is a kernel, a line of dialogue, anything I can sense concretely.
I've never thought of myself as a writer. I still don't, despite all the writing I've done.
Writing the songs and producing the songs and arranging them and recording them is your canvas and your palette and your brush.
When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.
I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'
One of my rules about writing exercises is you never are allowed to put them in your book because it's just too tempting. You try to shoehorn things that don't belong.
There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.
The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.
When I sat down to write I just felt like a geek writing about myself. And then it dawned on me, just because of the way I am, I can't stop talking, and part of the problem is that anything that gets said reminds me of something that happened to me one time, and invariably I cut people off and talk about myself.
I don't sit there writing songs, thinking, 'This would be good for Rihanna.' I don't want to be pitching out like that.
I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.
I would hope that my writing's cleaner than it was when I started.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.
When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
