When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
Saddam Hussein wrote the book on human rights violations.
I wrote 'Torches' before experiencing touring as a band. I really had no idea what they would sound like live, and that was something we had to figure out along the way.
For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.
I wrote songs with the guys from Air Supply for their record... So I was just writing songs.
I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.
I didn't start drama school until I was 20, and I don't think I would have gotten nearly as much out of it had I gone when I was 18. I didn't show up there to please anyone. After I was accepted, I wrote, 'The Audition's Over' and put it on the door of my dorm.
For 'So Cold the River,' I'm actually working on adapting the book with Scott Silver, who was just nominated for an Oscar for 'The Fighter,' and who also wrote '8 Mile,' which I think is a terrific screenplay. The chance to work with Scott is a tremendous pleasure and I'm learning a lot.
Hillary Clinton wrote a book. She got paid. I don't understand why I can't.
I loved the last album, and it was one hundred percent me. But this is like me two years later, who understands a little bit more about music and understands a little bit more about making an album. I wrote a lot more.
I was headed in the wrong direction. I didn't think I'd make it to 21. My Uncle Chuck saved my life. He was a graphic designer, and he gave me my first sketchbook. In the front, he wrote, 'Wear it like your underwear.'
I didn't want the headache of having a publisher reviewing everything I wrote in advance.
My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.
I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.
When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
They wrote it that my moustache was insured for 13 million.
I lived to write, and wrote to live.
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
A lot of comics fly by the seat of their pants, and they pride themselves on being witty, quick, and off-the-cuff. That's not my show. I wrote a show, and I want to do the show I wrote. I'm not interested in what the audience has to say.
The most personal track would have to be 'Love The Way We Used To.' It's one of the songs that I listen to outside of all the records that I wrote.
I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.
I wrote 'All You Could Ask For' to honor a friend, Heidi Armitage, who left us much too soon in 2009 at the age of 43.
When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, 'The Dentist.' I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.
I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote 'Talking Back to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients 'better than well.'
I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.
Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.
I once had a crush on one of my teachers. I wrote him a love letter and stuck it in a bag in his office. I didn't write my name on it, but I'm sure he figured out it was me.
I never thought that Trump was going to run for president, but I was very firmly on record, including in the book that I wrote before, 'Adios, America,' as saying that Republicans should stop wasting their time with these novelty candidates.
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.
I went to school in Gainesville because it was a huge punk and folk town. So I went to class twice a week, and then I went to shows and wrote. I did a lot of music writing before I actually started playing music.
I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.