I like visceral writing that people can't help but respond to, even if they respond, and they're shocked, or they're angry, or they're offended. I think that's the only way to reach people.
Taylor Swift dates guys so she can write a breakup song about them. I don't think she's dating for love - I think she's dating for creativity. So let's get her off the market and put her in dating detox. If she really wants love, she has to stop writing music about them.
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
My education and background thoroughly inform my writing.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
Writing is the easy part. The 'getting it right' part is harder.
Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.
I discovered that, in order to write a magnificent piece, you should shoot the images because once you are filming, you are writing the script in your mind.
Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers, and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.
Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.
When I wrote 'The Girl on the Train,' nobody knew who I was, and that's quite a comfortable position to be writing in.
Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.
'Back to Blood' really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except to the gym.
Even though I've reached retirement age, I still plan to work - writing my investment newsletter, speaking at conferences, publishing books, and producing conferences like FreedomFest.
I learned early in my writing career that if I try to tailor a song for someone else, I'm usually off base. They're usually looking for something from you with your character.
I hate writing.
I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
In high school, I was very active in extracurricular activities such as art, theatre, and choir. I also wrote for the school newspaper, but not regularly, because I never liked writing non-fiction very much.
If I were to try and find a unifying emotion that kept me calm and focused while I was dancing or writing or solving a math problem, I think the one unifying thing about all those that keeps my interest is creativity.
Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily.
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.
The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.
In my own life, I had gone from Maryland State Honors Chorus and writing and singing my own songs to a musical silence. It seemed the busier my work life would get, the less I had to feed the other parts of my own soul, including the arts.
Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.
People buy pads all the time, because they want to write stuff down. We're never going to get away from paper, ever. People like writing; that's why more people are writing more real thank-you notes now - not just to stand out, but because there's something about pen to paper, about holding something cool in your hands.
I love being a writer-director. I couldn't imagine directing without writing it. You have to write and tell your stories - that's what directing is to me.
I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.
I like going back and writing fiction.
Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.
I think there's plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That's just not the kind of blog I'm writing, and I'm not the kind of blogger that could do that.
I love the structural part of the writing process.
When evidence emerged that Clinton was a devoted mother, Margaret Carlson writing in 'TIME' found her guilty of 'yuppie overdoting on her daughter.'
I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.
I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.
