Neal Gabler Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.
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I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.
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I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.
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I like writing about biology, not doing it.
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I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
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Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
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I found it really hard for a couple of years to do any writing because all I wanted to do was play the fiddle. From the minute I took it up, I just couldn't put it down.
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At least half my writing time is spent researching. So for every hour I'm actually clicking on the keyboard, I'm spending another hour trying to figure out some tiny detail I need answered.
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Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process.
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I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.
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I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.
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In my writing with Extreme, there are heavy themes. The cover photo has me with a gun to my neck. I am not advocating suicide. I am taking the philosophy that man is the measure of his own fate.
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I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.
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I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
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If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.
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I've talked with friends about this: when you write about yourself, that's what people connect to. When you write a sermon or a lesson, that may not reach people. I've learned a lot from people who have been writing about themselves.
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Sugar is more present in America or England than it is in France. I think there is an addiction to sweetness.
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My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!
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The more wild experiences you have, the better songs you can write.
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Rarely do celebrities and actors speak up for what they believe in.
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I think the most important advice is, a person doesn't have to find out right away. It's not like their first attempt at finding a profession is the only one they're going to find. I might well have gone down other paths, and it still might have been okay. But if you find something that you love, and if it keeps deepening with each new experience, then just stay with it.
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I don't pay to have my dirty work done for me. I do it myself.
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I do remember feeling, 'I don't ever want to feel impotent in terms of what I can control in a business in which you can have very little control.' And that motivated me to go to law school - that, and my parents saying, 'Go to law school before you do anything.'
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Writing is not a profession, it's an addiction.
