Writing has always felt like a compulsion. Even at high school there'd be times when people would ask me if I wanted to go and hang out and I'd sit home and write instead.
When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.
I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.
I'm not writing just about melancholy stuff anymore, I made a point to cover a wide range of emotions.
Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.
They're mostly done before we went into the studio, although I do like writing in the studio.
The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.
The enemy of the modern woman is not women who like fashion or are writing about it. The enemy is stereotypes that come from all places and that tell you to be one way or the other. The enemy is really real sexist people, like Todd Akin, and people who are violent against women physically or sexually.
Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.
I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.
It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
Writing's like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.
I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.
I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.
Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.
This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.
You don't have to always write about big stuff. Writing is about expressing yourself, you know? It can be about small stuff, too.
Sometimes, you write things that sound really great when you're at home but don't work when you shine the light of an audience on them. Great writing and live writing are two separate things.
Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: 'Your life counts for something.' In no other subject that I know of is that message given.
I'd love to act more. I've had to turn down multiple movies because I was on tour, but it's encouraging to know that someday there might be the right role, the right timing. And I've been writing a lot of music, so hopefully very soon I'll have recorded a project of my own. I also want to get a boat and open a restaurant.
If I got dropped tomorrow or every single I released from now on tanked, I'd be devastated, but I'd also still be doing this. I'd still be writing songs. I'd still be recording them. I was doing that for four years in Nashville. This is just on a larger stage.
What I like writing about are people's relationships, not necessarily great big dramatic things but the smaller things in life and how they affect characters and challenge and change the people that they are. I do like a happy ending, so my books have to have a happy ending.
I wasn't writing the music. Ed would write a piece of music. I'd listen to it and come up with a melody and then we would arrange it. We'd put it together and I would write lyrics to my melodies.
Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.
Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
I was thinking about doing another film at the same time, which was the sequel to Basic Instinct and I just had a feeling that wasn't going to happen. You know, I just kind of read the writing on the wall.
When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.
One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.
The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.
Writing this record let me recapture who I am. It is summed up in the title Be Not Nobody. You need to feel comfortable in your skin and do whatever you need to do for yourself, to heal or to grow.
I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
