I can't envisage stopping writing.
I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.
You shouldn't even be writing this story if you haven't heard me play live. You can't write with the passion you receive until you see a Dick Dale concert.
I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.
I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.
My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.
I didn't originally intend on writing a book. I started writing during the day to feel like I was accomplishing something creative.
I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.
I'm very lucky to be in projects that have such skilled writing in them.
The way to write really good songs is to write about the things that happen in your life and where you are in the moment, and writing about stuff that happens in your 30s is not the sexiest song subject.
I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.
Building upon the world we created with 'Avatar' has been a rare and incredibly rewarding experience. In writing the new films, I've come to realize that 'Avatar's world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.
My writing life is always a bit disorganized. It's hard for me to get going, but sometimes, once I begin, I go like the wind.
Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can't do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it.
While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area.
I'd gone through the ups and downs and curveballs that life throws at you. I found writing to be very therapeutic and it helped me with a lot of the stuff I was going through.
But, if there's any aspect of my career that needs attention, it's writing.
Never apologise for not being someone else. You're bound to find something you're good at, even if it's only writing stories.
Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.
I would absolutely be interested in doing a Broadway production if it was the right project. But my dream is to be writing pieces of theater for my best friends and putting on plays in New York City and seeing our vision come alive. I just hope to always be creating.
I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.
My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail.
The 'sent' folder of my email program is really my biggest inspiration and my biggest source of lyrics. That's where I go to pick up a lot of the lyrics that I'm writing.
So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.
I would get a lot of writing done if I lived in isolation in a cave under a swamp.
My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.
What I enjoy as entertainment is what I enjoy writing.
I don't call acting a real job, and writing is a hobby.
