Well, I definitely have an artistic side to me as well. I write, I act, I draw. With that artistic mind I have, a lot of doors have opened for me. I can try to pursue, like - if it's something using my writing skills, maybe a book. Or maybe if it's my drawing skills, some clothing designs.
You know, I had the music baskets and the writing basket. And I had the acting. And those eggs just hatched first, and the others were slow to incubate.
Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.
I started writing when I had three kids under the age of 4. I used to write every ten minutes I got to sit in front of a computer. Now, when I have more time, I function the same way: if it's writing time, I write.
I'm a great believer in the experiential theory of writing.
I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.
I'd always fantasized about writing a new play. Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about in my dressing room is that one day I would do it.
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
I grew up in southern Africa but was born in England, so my family was afflicted with the stiff upper lip of the British. When coupled with the violence we saw as children, that can be a fatal combination. Fortunately, I have an outlet for trauma in my writing.
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
I was in a fertility situation publicly, so I disappeared. I was very satisfied just being to able to creatively express myself with writing. The white hot publicity that came from 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' was appreciated but not sought, so I was happy to walk away from it and then write.
I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.
Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.
Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.
It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
'Despacito' was a song that, from the time I started writing it, I felt that its hook was really catchy and powerful but at the same time very simple.
One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.
I can't sit and twiddle my thumbs. I have to start writing even if it's miserable some days.
I took acting lessons when I was 19, 20, and I had my writing.
I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.
It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometime. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.
When you are writing something that is false and presenting it as a fact without confirming... I feel it's extremely wrong.
To me, obstacles in life build character. You have to be able to overcome adversity in order to succeed and appreciate the simple things life has to offer... that's where most of my inspiration for writing and singing comes from.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.
I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.
I think, for me, one of the biggest things that I struggle with is keeping the excitement up when writing a song. A lot of times, I'll get pretty frustrated early on.
I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.
It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.
I've been writing joke songs since I was a kid and it served me well at S.N.L. I can write those in my sleep. In fact, I have.
I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.
One can become drab, dull, and boring doing the same thing every day. Writing helps break the monotony.
