Never before had I been offered a contract and advance before a word had been written... I went home and began writing 'Julie of the Wolves.'
I want to travel around the country and make my living playing music. I also try to behave in a way that I would appreciate as a music fan. That's how we conduct ourselves, be it in writing music or playing it live.
I love teaching online at my website and soon I'll be writing a math book. I love to teach math. I just don't have time for a full-time teaching gig. Acting is way too time-consuming.
Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
I'm very excited to work with everybody on 'The Bridge' - the cast, the writing staff, the executive producers - the show is really good. I'm very lucky to be a part of it.
I love writing Scottish dialogue.
I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.
Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.
I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.
Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.
Working on 'Drive', a lot of fun. This is Tim Minear whom I've worked with before on 'Firefly' of course. He called me up and said, 'I've got a part for you that you will love,' and I love Tim's writing. I love his stories. I love his characters, his dialogue. He has a knack for reveals and he has a knack for moments.
I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
I can spend the day without writing or reading, but I can't spend a day without listening to music.
I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.
To make time for writing, one has to take time out from somewhere. Obviously, a fair amount of time that you spend with the family gets compromised. But my family has been very understanding and supportive.
Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.
I co-wrote and produced 'Sticky Fingers' with Catlin Adams, who directed it. I learned a lot writing and producing with Cat. I spent as much time as I could in the cutting room with her. All the producing experience that I had helped.
When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out,and I'm just writing it down.
I'm not sure if a writer should talk about themes. Themes arrive out of the deeper structure and concerns, but to me, the main thing is getting it down right, writing about specific characters in specific predicaments, and finding a way to be true to the story itself, not only in the first burst of draft but in the revision, too.
While writing, I'm always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, 'I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.'
I enjoy writing and promoting my books. I enjoy the feedback. But all this is because I don't depend on it commercially. I don't need that money. I have a career.
I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.
The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.
I know I stand visibly onstage, but my function is still unseen, because I rarely see the immediate results of what I am saying or doing or writing.
My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.
There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
I can come off as pretty arrogant, but it's because I know I'm right. I'm very, very good at writing protocols. I've accomplished more working on my own than I ever did as part of a team.
When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.
I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.
Hoping they'd been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.
I have been around for a long, long time. I didn't make it 'til I was older. I went through the period when women were not getting signed, particularly if you were writing songs that were lyrically propelled.
I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Really, I don't like to do any household chores. There was a time when I loved to cook, but that was when I wasn't writing books.
