Everybody that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible things? That's always been my main area of inquiry, and it does lead you to dark places.
The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
Stephen King writes a lot of things that are really charming and quirky, and that are more ironic than horror.
If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
A lot of my creative energy is spent coming up with a concept that, once I get it, I feel like it writes itself.
Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice.
The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.
Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
I think the way Win Butler writes, I really identify with it. He writes very emotionally and very cinematically, and I just connect with his sensibility.
In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.
I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays, I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play.
We really try to make sure that the band writes the songs, not just one person.
I decided to become a surgeon named Bernie who writes books and gives seminars to teach people what he has learned and is still learning about how to deal with life's difficulties.
If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.
Adele ultimately did well in such a large way because she affects everybody, and the way that she writes seems to be popular music, not because of her skin color but because she writes great music, and it's popular in that way.
An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.
There are so many remarkable playwrights working right now, that I see everything I can. Annie Baker is a genius, I'll see anything she writes. The same for Lynn Nottage, Cynthia Hopkins, and Lisa D'Amour. Anything they've got going on, I'll go see.
As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.
I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.
If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.
There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.
I'm not really one of those people who goes and writes some big back story and agonizes over characters. I think you kind of can get it. For me personally, it's just kind of more instinctive. But I don't have kind of an acting background. I fell into it accidentally.
One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.
Even reading my first bad review was an awesome experience. It was cool because you make something and not everybody's going to like it. I felt like that kind of grew me up a little bit into a professional. I was a student filmmaker, and no one writes reviews about student films.
In the U.K., we have a paper called 'The Daily Mail,' which is quite misogynist. And every day, it just writes pieces about: 'Women, you're going to die now! Women, here's shoes that give you cancer! Women, just hate yourselves!'
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
Big Stephen King fan. I think he's dismissed often as a hack probably because of his prolific body of work, but he's anything but. I think he's a terrific writer. And not just a genre writer; he really approaches a number of complexities in everything he writes. So I'm a huge fan.
