The first couple of pictures I wrote and directed were dreadful, because I was dealing in worlds that were not familiar to me, and writing about fantasy. They were just not anything I was really connected to.
Like, I kind of developed my musical style in a vacuum. Even though I listen to a lot of stuff, the way I wrote was in my bedroom, really privately. It's still the way I write, actually.
English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.
There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.
The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet's permission, so is courage.
I didn't choose a word or anything. I just wrote the song until it stopped.
And now it looks like I'm probably going to shoot a movie that I wrote. I got the money to do it, and I would star and all, because of being on Howard.
So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.
How do I let the director know how obsessed I am and willing to do anything for the movie? Like, I wanted to write this one director a letter, so I wrote him a handwritten note. But then I was like, 'How many people are writing this guy handwritten letters? Is it going to seem cheesy? What do I do?'
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.
It seemed to me that I could write commercial fiction. I wasn't sure whether I could, or whether I wanted to write serious fiction at that point. So I said, 'Let me try something else,' and I wrote a mystery - but I didn't know much about it.
People have said things about me, and wrote and criticized me about things in the past, but it goes in one ear and out the other.
I wrote 'All is Lost' while editing 'Margin Call'. I did that long before I knew if I was ever going to get to make another movie.
I had one of those defining moments in the fourth grade when my teacher said the story I wrote was the best in the class, and therefore I would be going Young Authors Conference where I'd get to hang out with authors all day.
Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
I went to New York and Miami and hung out by the beach, and I love the American boys, so I wrote a song about it.
When I was eight or nine, I wrote a new version of 'Peter Pan' for the school play. They didn't use it - I imagine it was unperformable - but as recompense for not doing my script, I was offered any role, and instinctively went for Captain Hook. I came on trying to be terrifying, but everyone laughed at me.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't.
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.
I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.
I never said I'm not a feminist! I wrote one column where I was being sarcastic, and I called myself a 'wombist'. Now which sane person would say that 'wombist' is a better term than feminist? I was being sarcastic, and perhaps it was my fault in not getting the point across as clearly as I would have liked to. I don't think there's any doubt.
The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is - and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn't even give me her telephone number - and she wrote in her diary: 'A funny little man asked me to marry him.'
I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead.
After we wrote The Wreckoning, our record label did listen.
No, I just thought of a story and wrote down what I saw. It was about two kids in Ireland who went around killing people. It was called Travelers, and it was made as an independent film.
One of the people that wrote a forward to my book is Gerry Spence, whom I admire. Gerry is a friend of mine, and Gerry's perhaps the leading criminal defense attorney in the country.
There was one reviewer from the 'New York Times,' I forget his name, who said I was 'death warmed over.' I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The 'Times' fired him, put him in the cooking department!
And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.
I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.
The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that's probably my favorite thing that I've done.
