The first song that I remember writing in its entirety was when I was 9 years old. I wrote it on a bus, on a field trip. It was called 'Mystery Man,' and in retrospect, it was the beginning of my exploration of what it was like to have a man in your life, because I didn't.
I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'
I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.
I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.
There's a film that I wrote that I want to do called 'The Grey,' which is about a group of pipeline workers in Alaska flying back into civilization after being remote for a number of months. The 737 they're on goes down, and they begin to be hunted by a pack of rogue wolves.
I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
I spent about five years stuck in a room between the ages of 16 and 20 while I wrote the first book, which came out when I was 21. I should have been out playing tennis.
I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.
My first songs were about animals and shoes. I wrote one song about PF Flyers, and one to my fish.
Several groups have information evaluating seafood sustainability. I wrote the first such guide, and seafood pocket-guides and detailed evaluations of different seafoods are available for download from the group I founded, Blue Ocean Institute.
I've been doing this career for a really long time, but there was not a lot of reason, at the time when I wrote 'Fight Song,' to believe that I should keep going.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
'Onward' was a song I wrote in Montreux, in Switzerland, when we were there camping out for the whole winter. In the summer, Montreux is a really, really big summertime-touristy, full-of-life kind of place. In the winter, it closes down.
At school, myself and some pals, all football-daft, divided up the old English First Division and wrote off to half a dozen clubs each asking for a trial.
When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.
When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.
Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.
I can count on one hand the number of people who wrote me a thank you letter after having an interview, and I gave almost all of them a job.
Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.
I tried, after I wrote 'Twilight,' to read 'The Historian,' because it was the big thing that summer. But I can't read other people's vampires. If it's too close, I get upset; if it's too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.
'Love Will Keep Us Together' was a combination of three different singing styles - Al Green, the Beach Boys, and Diana Ross. I loved all these people, and I put their singing styles together and wrote that tune.
I've always wanted to write an early reader. When I wrote my first novel, my goal was to make it an early reader, but it grew beyond the category.
I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.
I think one thing that makes me delay projects more than other people is, I see this silver lining in a turn-down. Maybe if I just wrote a script and then pounded my head against all the doors, I would be shooting more films.
I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.
I wrote in coffee shops in Japan when I was 22, 23, before I had the stamina to sit down and write. I liked the buzzy environment; I couldn't speak Japanese when I arrived, so it was kind of a white noise. It felt more sociable than being alone, but now, as I've developed a writing practice, I couldn't do it.
For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.
Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.
I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.
I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.
I didn't ever imagine, except in the most idle, obviously wish-fulfillment, ego-gratification fantasies, that anything I wrote would ever win awards, let alone so many.
I was on mad platinum albums... I produced and wrote on them.
For a while, I became a model scout and agent, thinking naively I could change the industry from the inside, and even kicked off the famous 'size zero debate' with an article I wrote to the 'Evening Standard' about my concerns from behind the curtain of the business, back in 2005.
I wrote 'Monster' and thought that it would solve a lot of my problems, that I'd have money in the bank, but I felt no different. I was still searching for something.
When I was a kid, they made us write these essays about what Heaven would be like. I went to this Christian school in Texas, and the thing that I wrote was no bees. No bees. No mud. No infirmities.
I remember one time I wrote something very, very critical about Wilt Chamberlain. The next time I saw him - and Wilt was not a man, as huge as he was - he was not a man of confrontation. And we were in the Lakers locker room. And he sent Jerry West over, and he said, 'Frank, Wilt would like you to leave.'
