The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.
I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before.
I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
I wrote two plays before I was cast on 'The Neighbors.' They actually got published, which was cool.
The great Comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, putting forward the development of sports as a matter that has an important bearing on the prosperity of the country and nation, indicated the road ahead of the Juche-based sports and wrote a new chapter in the history of building a sports power by dint of outstanding ideas and leadership.
Rattigan wrote some very good plays.
I think what it means to be an 'American Girl,' and what I wrote the song about, is our freedoms. The idea that we as Americans can be what we want to be and say what we want to say and that we take it for granted.
My eldest brother Atticus just won an Oscar some years ago, as he wrote the music for 'The Social Network.'
In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.
For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.
I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.
I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers.
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.
That's why I wrote 'Fighter'. I have that need in me to help people. I am all about the underdog.
'The First Time' is a song that I wrote by myself on my front porch, in real-time, as that situation was happening to me.
I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.
The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.
My writing routine is: get son off to school and sit down at 8 A.M. I read what I wrote the day before, and then write longhand, into a notebook. I prefer paper and pen because it feels closer to my brain.
I'm a strong nonbeliever in the Christmas letter where you don't really read it because it's just full of kind of meaningless information. It doesn't really resonate to the person reading it, but it means so much to the person that wrote it.
I don't usually watch a lot of TV, but 'Mad Men' changed my perspective. I admire Matthew Weiner who came up with the idea and wrote such a great TV series, and the broadcasting company for being bold enough to air such a series.
I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.
When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
Nothing has changed that much, even during filmmaking for 'The Descendants.' I wrote. I took the kids to school. I cleaned the house. And I had dinner with George Clooney.
My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
I pretty much always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing goofy stories when I was 7 or 8. That was what I call 'wishful-thinking writing.' I grew up in the city and always wanted a horse, but there was no way I was getting a horse. So I wrote all these stories about kids who had horses. It's still fun entering these other worlds.
A number of former Wells Fargo employees have described their work environment characterized by intense pressure to meet aggressive and unrealistic sales goals. In a 2010 letter to shareholders, Mr. Stumpf wrote that Wells Fargo's goal was eight products per customer because eight rhymed with great.
I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.
When we write, we complement each other. We wrote six songs, Barry and I, while Robin was ill during the American tour, and they were terrible until Robin came back, and then everything worked out.
Things began to pick up for me record-wise when in 1971 I wrote 'She's a Lady' for Tom Jones.
'Sunrise Sunset' is a letter I wrote to a girl I was once with who I really thought I was going to fall in love with. We tried to make it work but always had trouble maintaining a real relationship because we were both so caught up with work, life, and everything else that at the time seemed like it was the priority.
At the time I wrote 'Forever,' I had a 14-year-old daughter, and she was reading a lot of books about young love.
When I wrote 'Noughts and Crosses', I was halfway through it when I realised this was very like 'Romeo and Juliet'... as long as you make it your own, and put your own spin on it, I think it's brilliant to use other great work to find your own voice.
Do you know why Albert Camus was so prolific? He wrote to keep from screaming.
I get tips from Bob Gaudio. And one of my songs somehow caught the attention of one of my idols, Marty Panzer, who wrote big hits for Barry Manilow. So two guys who inspired me to write lyrics are now teaching me to write.
