But I never listen to music while I'm writing.
Originally I was not writing songs for myself.
The most important advice I can offer is that writing is a craft that you can learn by practicing. If you keep writing, you will improve.
Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
I have been threatened occasionally. But that happens to everybody who is writing this kind of things. Threats will come without fail. It might happen to the most 'innocent' texts. If it gets too much we call the police.
I start with characters, and then I start writing, and then, if I'm lucky, things start to happen.
When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
I didn't live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don't know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.
When we moved to Australia in 2008, I decided to try to live off the writing.
Writing is work and cooking is relaxing.
I'm more interested in writing than in performing.
My favorite songwriting trick is writing something like 'XO.' In my brain, I thought, 'This is probably going to be a love song. How can I change that and find ways to twist that.' As a songwriter, it's your job for the song to take twists and turns that people don't expect.
A Train was born without any effort - if was like writing a letter to a friend.
I always sang. I wanted to be in a band with my sister, and I was, at 11. At 12, I started writing seriously, and that was my pacifier all through high school - that and painting.
Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.
When I started writing it was kind of hard getting people to do my stuff. They' say they couldn't do my style.
After the children grew up, I began to focus on my writing. My first books were part of a trilogy... The 'Wind Dance' trilogy.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.
I wasn't very good about juggling family and my career. I was interested in who was coming to the children's birthday party, what my son was writing. I was thinking about Legos.
In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.
I made straight A's and never got into any trouble, and I still impose those standards on myself. So writing is my chance to escape and become the sleaziest, scummiest role.
No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.
When you get the right people together, writing music becomes very effortless.
I never considered writing as a career - it was always a creative outlet for me and something I just loved to do.
All my children inspire me in life, and that always comes out in the writing.
With great writing, there is great clarity.
Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.
I'm so independent in writing stuff and controlling what I do. Sometimes I get calls from people asking to be in their movie, but I'm always writing or editing, and I can never get around to doing it. I'm so much more interested in my own stuff. I think I drive my agent crazy.
I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
Of mediumship there are many grades, one of the simplest forms being the capacity to receive an impression or automatic writing, under peaceful conditions, in an ordinary state; but the whole subject is too large to be treated here.
School is something that you learn - reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.
I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
Sophie does more of the writing, lyrical stuff; I do more of the sitting at the computer and the board stuff. But it blurs. If we're both really feeling it, then we'll keep going with the song.
