Once you're done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner.
I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.
My job, originally, was to write blog posts for their 'HubSpot' blog. They have a business model built on content. Then I was writing e-books for them, and after I came back from L.A., they had this new plan to launch a podcast.
Directing, writing, producing and starring is just too tough.
I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.
I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.
The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
Singing was probably my first love, and song writing. I write a lot of love songs and heartbreaking songs.
I get a great high from writing.
I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.
I had kids at age 47, and very late in life, and I'd been doing it for 30 straight years, writing songs, making a record and touring and starting the process right over.
It is my writing dilemma. The world of spying is my genre. My struggle is to demystify, to de-romanticise the spook world, but at the same time harness it as a good story.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.
People writing about me have said that I've influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.
When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.
I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound.
The songwriting community in Nashville really is all about your talent. It's not about your image, and you have to be humble. You have to be kind. You have to have zero ego when you walk into that writing room.
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.
What we need is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that.
I'm opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I'm launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.
I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.
It's been an objective of mine since I started writing songs to include both intellect and energy.
I had a moment where I left journalism, and I started getting interested in this issue and writing about it, where I felt there was a right side and a wrong side around a lot of these issues relating to education.
In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.
The failure of The Cable Guy impacted my career. I had to start writing and acting again.
Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would.
I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.
Writing keeps my mind occupied during the down time in my acting career. Even when I am working, there are times when I have multiple days off each week. Also, the writing allows me to 'do' movies that I would never do as an actor.
You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.
