When I started out, I wrote the songs, recorded the songs, mastered, mixed, did the artwork, made the packaging and did the distribution, all myself. Now I understand what everyone's jobs are, who is doing them right, and who isn't.
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
'Parsifal' is one of the great examples in art of a work that transcends the personality of the man who wrote it.
The last book I read before I wrote my first book - 'Ghosts of Manhattan' - was 'The Gold Coast' by DeMille. I loved it, and it gave me a lot of energy to start into my own.
The jokes I was always attracted to, and that I would tell for the longest, were jokes where I cared about the subject. Whenever I wrote a joke where I didn't care, even if it was really funny, the third time I told it, it would lose steam.
I wrote a song with a guy named Brian McKnight, who's a huge R&B guy.
The poem 'What Teachers Make' is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: 'Gee, Mr. Mali. You don't possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?' And that was the first time I'd ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I'm sure I have a teacher-God complex.
When I'm dead, somebody can write my biography. I wrote a national hymn, an anthem, which I don't want to present to that country. But I have a deal with my wife - when I'm dead, she should offer it, because then I'm safe.
I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis.
Whatever people want to say, we go out there every night, and we give tribute to the songs that my brother wrote, to Ronnie and Allen Collins and Steve Gaines and Leon Wilkeson and everybody. We pay tribute every night to those people who have gone on.
Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.
It sounds like I'm joking when I say it, but when I wrote 'Take Me To Church' and a lot of these things, I didn't think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience.
I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.
I don't remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.
In 1976 I wrote a lot about women trying to claim the right to work.
I used to be a calligrapher for weddings and events - that was my side job while I was auditioning. I think handwritten notes are a lost art form. When I booked my first pilot, my dad wrote me a letter that I still have. The idea of someone taking the time to put pen to paper is really special.
I wrote a song for Icona Pop which boosted my confidence quite a lot.
But the character was so successful, that first one, that they wrote him again and he came in right at the end of the first year in a show called THE BOX. I was up for the Emmy for that one too.
I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.
When the Beatles wrote 'Paperback Writer,' it couldn't have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it's not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; Madison wrote not only the United States Constitution, or at least most of it, but also the most searching commentary on it that has ever appeared. Each of them served as president of the United States for eight years. What they had to say to each other has to command attention.
I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
There are so many reasons to mark the passing of the great Joe Cocker - as many songs as he wrote, recorded and performed in his remarkable concerts. For me, Cocker was also the only performer who successfully covered and even improved on The Beatles.
In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.
I never was a liner note junkie. I didn't know who produced records or there was such a thing as a straight songwriter. I always assumed that everybody that was singing a song wrote it or made it up.
I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'
I didn't act in Israel, but I wrote plays at home and acted in plays at school. I tried to get an agent when I was 12, but they told me that I had too much of an accent.
I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.
I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.
My favorite book is 'Go Away Big Green Monster.' I wrote it for my granddaughter Adrian, who was in the third grade at the time.
That's actually how my parents met. They were pen pals. My mom was in the Philippines and my father was in the States, and they wrote to each other. He went out to meet her, and they wed not too long after.
'Rise Up' is definitely my baby. I think it was a gift because, you know, it's like God just spoke to me and wrote that song. It's very powerful.
I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
There aren't many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called 'Horned Pigeon.' He had been on the run and hadn't eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable.
