There was a period when STP and I weren't making music - we weren't getting along very good at all. But I had my studio, so I was writing and recording a lot of music. But something told me not to put it out. It was all stream of consciousness; it was clever, but it didn't really have substance.
When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.
I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
I find writing extraordinarily difficult and not very pleasurable, though I find having done it very pleasurable. I won't lie about that.
I like telling stories with a sense of humor. But humor can also distance you from the subject you're writing about. I'm interested in using humor as a portal to something a bit more serious.
I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.
You put these politicians in office, but then you've got to tell them what you want them to do. And it's intimidating to most people. I was intimidated by it. I mean, calling my senator or writing my senator? I'm like, what do I say? What do I do? But we're showing people that the political process is actually less intimidating than we think.
I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.
I'm not very good at writing songs when I have a lot of clutter in my mind.
I have often felt a motion of love to leave some hints in writing of my experience of the goodness of God, and now, in the thirty-sixth year of my age, I begin this work.
A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.
I've been writing and composing songs since I was 5 years old.
I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
My writing is really intuitive. As a kid, I went to school in New Jersey and hung out in New York, so the way kids used to talk got into our earlier songs.
So writing is a very, very difficult position to obtain... and retain.
What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
I am an avid reader! As for writing, I might - someday. But we'll have to wait and see.
In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better.
People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'
Not only is writing more important than ever, but visual literacy is vital. We don't teach enough design, art, visual things. We have to recognize what we're seeing. It matters if you send someone a cluttered design. It matters more than ever.
I want to be an animated character. I'm also doing more writing and directing.
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
I had a lot of notes and fragments and observations that never amounted to anything. After the Wall had gone down, so many people were writing about Berlin, I didn't have the same urgency or feel enough authority.
I'd say the key thing is to remain true to what originally got you into music. When I wrote 'Hallelujah,' it ignited me to do music because of the love and joy that I got from writing that song. Down the road, you get all of these opinions from people; just remember what got you started in the first place.
In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.
What I wanted to do was to earn enough money to pay for my mother's house. When my mother passed away, I wanted to buy it from the rest of my family and keep the house in the family. That was the only reason I even attempted writing for money.
So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.
I never really thought of myself as a TV critic. I was presenting TV before I was writing about it.
Writing is a lonely job unless you're a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach.
I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.
Velcro: what a rip-off.
The writers are writing human beings, and they're writing about the human condition and how difficult it is to function in that condition. I think it's one of the charms of the show, the idea of redemption and working towards becoming better people, for everybody involved.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
Writing is always personal in some way but not always in a direct way.
