Most of the songs I wrote are personal.
I think the reason I was 23 before I ever wrote a song was that I was afraid of testing myself. What would I do if I discovered I didn't have anything to say?
Acting's incredibly enjoyable, but sometimes it doesn't feel quite enough. I've also written a script about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This will make me sound like a female Kenneth Branagh, but I can't think of anything nicer than directing myself from a script I wrote.
Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.
When we made 'Night of the Living Dead,' we got riddled. There was this famous article Roger Ebert wrote just blasting the film because he had gone to see it at some screening where there were all these kids in the audience. I don't know why that happened. We didn't make the movie for kids.
I wrote three books before I got one published. Most writers do. Have faith, and know that with each work you are getting better.
One of the things about the Constitution - that our forefathers wrote, and basically, there were none of our foremothers that were there. There were none of our fore-sisters there. There are changes that can take place, and there is room to change.
I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.
I've written pilots. I wrote a movie.
I wrote 'Happy Man' with a couple of boys of mine. I have been writing in Nashville for a long time. Of course I was writing songs back in Oklahoma when I was a kid.
I dropped out of college and ended up making this feature film I wrote when I was 19 with some friends. It was terrible.
Even if I wrote a song about math or animals or whatever, there would still be the question, 'Why did you write about that? And what does it say about you?'
I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.
'Die a Happy Man' was one of those that, when I wrote it and sent it to my label, their response was, 'This is a career record.' I was like, 'Why do you think that?' I think the stars aligned.
My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first 'Alfred Kropp' book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish - until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After that, it was off to the races, and I am so glad.
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, 'Concerning the Nature of Things.'
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.
I wrote for 10 years before I even started the 'Percy Jackson' series.
'The Replacements' is where I met Jon Favreau, and we just clicked like, you know, like kids at a camp. And he wrote my next movie, which was 'Made.'
There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.
In New York, working at the foundry, I was making these little figures. I desperately would like to make big figures, but I just can't do it; my hands don't do it. We were talking about making bronze plinths, and then we made one, a square one. I wrote on it, then I put a little figure on top, and it just looked really good. It worked.
In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them.
In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs for the hell of it, but I didn't want to make a record just for the sake of making a record.
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers.
I think I knew I was going to be a musician for the rest of my life kind of early. When I was in third grade, I was playing in a talent show, and my dad wrote a two- or three-minute boogie-woogie piece. I played it, everybody loved it, and I was like, 'Wow, this is great.'
I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.
I've always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it's done.
'Shotgun's one of the first songs I ever wrote. It's about a couple I met at Waffle House, an all night diner I used to hang at before I could go to bars.
Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson's forte. In her novels, 'Anywhere but Here,' 'The Lost Father' and 'A Regular Guy,' Simpson wrote wide and long and high about the most profound human bonds: parents and children lost each other, found each other, lost each other again, but differently.
I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else's because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.
I did a live late-night talk show called 'Creation Nation' with friends of mine. I had a sidekick and a band, and I wrote the whole thing. And it had the form of a late-night talk show, but we did it on stage because no one was giving me a TV show at the time.
For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
For me to be able to punch above my weight creatively, to actually take a stand for what I was doing, I had to take on everything. I had to be the person who says, 'I wrote it. I directed it.'
