Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day. And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden, there were agents and offers.
'After 17' is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, 'Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,' but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child.
No, 'F/X 2' was a job. I enjoyed doing it but that was definitely a job. I wrote that, I didn't direct it but 'Candyman' and the earlier horror movies I made, I was completely into horror and suspense and always have been. It's informed everything I've done, even the way scenes are shot in 'Kinsey and 'Gods and Monsters.'
I'm sure you're aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can suddenly start coming out at once even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago.
I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don't have their hands open, there's something they're grasping because there's a lot of things to grasp in a prosperous country.
The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.
I'm spectacularly disorganised. I wrote my latest book in seven different notebooks scattered throughout my house.
Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me. My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.
'Peace Train' is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again.
George wrote Taxman, and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what could happen to your money.
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
I wrote a graphic novel called 'Soul Stealer' with big, beautiful, epic artwork by Chris Shy. It grew into a trilogy.
When I wrote 'The Rozabal Line,' I had no preconceived notions of what a commercial bestseller should be. I have always viewed 'The Rozabal Line' as my first love and probably my best work. The fact, however, is that it is my least read work.
I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.
I'm astonished by my success. I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous.
I'm influenced a lot by Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, even Paul Weller - Billie Holiday as well: People who wrote and sang songs that were reflective of their times. I quite like that. I quite admire that.
I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.
At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.
I moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. I found out that was a job, that someone would pay you to sit in a room with a guitar and make up songs! It is the greatest job in the world. I wrote three or four songs a day. That's what I lived for.
End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.
I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest.
When we finally came to start work on this, the joy was it was only Joel and I, we didn't have to answer to anybody, and we didn't have to submit a screen play or anything like that. We just wrote it and then made it.
Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.
I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.
They had always told me that I wrote like a man.
I went to film school, worked as an assistant, and wrote several scripts that haven't gotten made.
When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them, 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.
New-Year's Day arriving, and the ministers, to whom I wrote, remaining silent, I consider their silence as evidence, that they cannot prove what I said not to be from the Lord, and have therefore published as I was directed.
I've always thought that whether I'm writing or not, I've gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they're mine. I'm not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I've gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.
I wrote my book 'The Amorous Busboy Of Decatur Avenue' completely like a writer does, writing it down, re-writing everything. But in my stand-up, I improvise initially, never questioning it too closely.
I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started.
When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.
When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog - big as a donkey.
Of course, we wrote the songs accordingly and performed and recorded them that way. At that time, we really thought it was right, but you know, seen in retrospect, it made the album sound forced, and not really great.
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'
