I've always had a little bit of darkness, and I've always been someone who was grieving. I had kind of had a tumultuous upbringing living in an abusive home, so for me, writing has always been a point of catharsis.
Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.
As a solo artist, it's so easy to be lumped into a singer / songwriter genre and writing sleepy, sad songs that are very emotionally rich that mean a lot to you, and people just get kind of tired.
I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years.
I found the writing arena to be much less competitive.
On the day my daughter was born, I started writing a book for her. The plan was that, over the course of her life, I'd fill it with advice on how to be a strong woman. But along the way, I got caught up in the stories of Amelia Earhart, Sally Ride, and so many others. So how do you pick the best heroes for your kids?
Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Of course the playing is important but writing and the establishing of what you are going for is prime too.
Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in.
The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.
When I started writing 'Luck in the Shadows,' I just wanted to create an adventure story.
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
I don't think I was ever designed to be a ubiquitous worldwide star. I'm a singer-songwriter writing quite personal songs. You're not supposed to chuck me on a stage with bells and whistles. There was a struggle ahead after that happened, and perhaps I was trying to write songs to compete in that arena.
The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.
Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves.
My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it's all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.
I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it.
I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I'm interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for - trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn't normally appeal to.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.
Generally, if you preface an interview request with, 'I'm an author writing a book,' for some reason, that seems to open a lot of doors.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
I ended up on 'Heroes' because I auditioned for the part like everybody else, but the writers were writing the role of Daphne, which was originally called Joy.
One could see that what you are writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. Now, for the first time, I can tell you that you are a disaster.
In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.
I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I've been or something I've done. Or politics. It's going to what's on my mind at the moment.
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios.
The writing of a melody is an emotional moment; success doesn't make it easy.
'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
Really, when I write a book I'm the only one I have to please. That's the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay.
In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That's not the general cultural expectation of women.
When I first started drumming, when I was 14 or 15, I started writing songs. I wrote for a couple of years, but when we started 'Radiohead' it became very apparent quite quickly that I just wanted to concentrate on the drumming.
And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.
I'm pretty disciplined to keep the momentum of a story going by writing everyday, even if it's only a couple paragraphs or a page or two.
