Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
People wrote about me and started calling me a star, and I just hated it. There are aspects of it that are great - I mean, you can ring up any restaurant and get in, can't you.
My mother was an actress in comedies. My father wrote scenarios. They were not opposed to my being an actor. I really didn't know what it meant, but I wanted to be one anyway.
I always wrote about myself in the third person. I knew how to promote myself so it sounded intelligent. I know how to package myself.
I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.
I wrote my first short story in third grade.
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
Every word I wrote in my book is documented, certified, true, and correct. The truth wins, and that is my picture.
It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.
I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.
I had a moment where I wrote a movie script, and it was my first movie job, and I was very excited to do it, and my only goal was really not to get fired off of it.
My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote 'Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking.' He named Earth Day 'Earth Day.' It falls on his birthday, April 22. Earth Day, birthday. So the idea came easily.
I always said, if I got a record deal, I'd want to record the best songs I could, whether I wrote them or not.
I would love to have a song that I wrote by myself to win a 'Song of the Year' award.
I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.
When people know I wrote 'Thelma and Louise,' they don't want to mess with me.
I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.
I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.
When I wrote about media and technology, I had a lot of lonely, even intimate book talks. Since writing about dogs, I have a lot of company at book signings.
I remembered what it was like: the weirdness, being the odd man out, trying to make my way around campus, and trying to figure out who my friends would be, who to steer clear of. I wrote it all down in a fanciful way - the feelings of alienation, the feelings of uncertainty, of being away from home for the first time.
I wrote a song that basically turned into a public service announcement for the fellas out there, like, 'Should you run into this type of woman, run for your life!' So the name of the song is 'Run,' featuring the rapper ScHoolboy Q. It's one of the standouts on the album, in my personal opinion.
In my early days, I wrote my dissertation for MIT at the London School of Economics, really under James Meade, but my dissertation was five chapters on the theory of capital movement, but it didn't mention money.
I once wrote a book on courage and what made people courageous. I found it was a strength of belief matched by a strength of willpower.
I wrote 'Buried Child' in a trailer at an old ranch house we had in California.
I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
When I was first approached about doing an autobiography, I said, 'absolutely not.' But when I sat down, memories came pouring out. It wrote very quickly - I think there was an emotional impulse, because once I started in, the story itself carried me along. It was a very intense writing period and took a year and change to finish.
In my first book, 'A Return to Love', I wrote about things in the outer world that need to change - how we need to ameliorate deep poverty, heal the earth, end war.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
I've been writing songs all my life. My mom said I wrote my first song when I was two.
When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.
I'm no relation to Lillian or Dorothy Gish. Not even way back. But when I first became interested in acting, I wrote a letter to Lillian Gish. She wrote back, discouraging me from entering the business.
Mike Campbell and Don Henley and I wrote 'The Heart of the Matter,' which was a huge hit for Don.
For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.
I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry at the dinner table.
