I was on 'Murder She Wrote' with Angela Lansbury. She was fantastic... she was lovely to everyone, she was always on time, prepared. Whereas when I worked with Bob Hope, he didn't know his lines. He had to have these huge big cards... he hardly said two words to me all day.
I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.
I got about 6037 songs I wrote myself and I'm trying to get them on the market and I just wish people could hear them and stuff but they'll do pretty good.
I wrote it the right way, so it was copied the wrong way right. I mean the right way wrong.
But John Landis wrote a good relationship which is really what the film's about. A very straightforward young woman who's very sure of herself and she meets a young man who needs some taking care of.
I was having a conversation with my father and he was talking about this thing - strangeness and charm. It's actually the name of the two smallest particles that there are when you split the atom, so I wrote a song around it. I even managed to fit the word 'hydrogen' in there. Isn't that a nice thing for scientists to call them though?
I wrote 'Channel Orange' in two weeks. The end product wasn't always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.
So I think it was a good thing It was a little surreal watching Leo scream 'I'm not going to die today!' with our music playing - that was the last thing on my mind when I wrote the song.
I was separated from my wife at the time. A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.
My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.
I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.
I was just 20 years old when I wrote Broken Arrow.
'The Warmth of the Sun' was a very beautiful song that Brian and I wrote in the time period associated with President Kennedy's assassination. We didn't write words about that, but it was around that time we recorded that song, and there's a lot of emotion involved there.
If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration - and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration - is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.
I was going to go to college and graduate and move to New York and do the Broadway thing. That's where a lot of my influences vocally and writing come from. Then I did some covers, and towards the end of college, I saw it was a path I could take. I wrote more pop music.
Everyone wrote our obituary but us and the coaches and the kids who stayed with us. The obit was, 'Vanderbilt will have to leave the Southeastern Conference. All the coaches are leaving, and all the students are transferring.'
Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.
When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.
'Pumped Up Kicks' is written from the perspective like Truman Capote wrote 'In Cold Blood' or Dostoevsky wrote 'Crime & Punishment.' It's psychologically breaking down someone's state of mind and diving in and walking in their shoes.
I wrote 'Flatliner' with Dierks Bentley in mind in 2013.
I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.
I got my equity card, found my agent, and then I got a part on 'Gilmore Girls.' That turned into a job that kept giving - they wrote more for me.
I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.
I can't remember anything I ever wrote.
So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.
As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.
I wrote a lot when I was younger, though never anything like plays or scripts.
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.
With 'Brick,' I wrote the script when I was 23 and didn't make the movie until I was 30.
I was always a bit concerned about purity of essence. I never wanted a job that might affect the way I wrote or thought.
And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.
I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.
A constant goal of mine is to try to put myself back in the place when I wrote something - not just to perform it on a surface level, but to re-enter that headspace, that emotion. That's the point of a live show - for it to feel immediate and present and a little bit unpredictable.
When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.
I've wanted to write ever since I've gotten into comics. I wrote little things for myself when I was doing mini-comics and things, before becoming a professional. But I just figure at some point or another, I've got to make the leap. I just have to do it.
